Several positive student academic outcomes are associated with women's college attendance, yet little is known about how women's college students make meaning of classroom practices, experiences, and interactions. The purpose of this study, a qualitative research endeavor in the hermeneutic phenomenological tradition, was to achieve a better understanding of the nature of the lived classroom experience at a women's college and the meaning women's college students made from their everyday lived classroom experiences. The sample consisted of 10 participants at a single women's college in the southern region of the United States who had completed at least 60 credit hours at the institution and were enrolled as full-time residential students. Data were collected through a series of three interviews conducted with participants and reflection essays authored by participants. Study participants described the women's college classroom environment as a place where professors encouraged student participation in classroom discussions and where students could voice ideas, experiences, and uncertainties in an accepting space. The women's college students in this study indicated they received individual reaffirmation and intellectual validation from professors and peers, and over time became more likely to take risks with their thinking, aloud, in the classroom environment. Study participants made meaning from their classroom experience by actively reflecting on how these experiences fostered personal growth, comparing lived experiences to preconceptions, and imagining how their undergraduate experience would have been different had they chosen to attend a coeducational college. / Ph. D.

This thesis examines the impact of local and national education policies on teachers' practice in six secondary schools in two similar, non-contiguous, metropolitan authorities. Ten propositions on the relationship between policy and action were generated from a literature review and related to literature on school organisation and culture. Empirical data to test them were collected between September 1987 and July 1989, during the development of National Curriculum legislation and statutory instruments but prior to its implementation in secondary schools. Extended interviews were conducted with sixty-six teachers, the six Headteachers, and both Chief Inspectors. Detailed interview reports were confirmed as accurate with each interviewee. National influences were found to be important, particularly public examination reforms. This was attributed to their public use as indicators of school effectiveness, and to teachers' own positions resting on their own examination success for legitimacy. Personal professional values led to the LEA and its officers being dismissed as insignificant: factors internal to the school were more important. Chief among these was teachers' relationships with their departmental colleagues, especially how their perception of their needs and obligations as teachers of particular subjects, with particular epistemologies, affected departmental opportunities as management units to influence individual practice and require conformity to external requirements. Relations with senior staff were also important, and how far informal networks of power and influence operated against the formal hierarchies. Lastly, personal professional values stressed classroom experience as the only satisfactory basis for offering direction or guidance to teachers. This view of the teacher as expert emphasised that teachers must ultimately have autonomy to decide how best to handle classroom situations, and not only downgraded LEA staff and teacher education as sources of assistance, but also worked to prevent teachers from acknowledging problems to their colleagues.

Although this project refers to theory and literature about giftedness and independent learning, it is based primarily on narratives of classroom experience. The key belief is that the best way to build on the strengths and meet the needs of adolescent gifted learners is for the teachers involved to create a classroom learning climate and curriculum which coaches those students towards independent learning. Such a climate and curriculum provide opportunities for gifted adolescents to reach their potential. An adaptable and practical three-stage model for designing such a curriculum is provided. By integrating self-and teacher assessment and evaluation throughout three stages of curriculum, the model provides opportunities for students to develop the skills necessary for independent learning. Three narratives of my own experiences in using the three-stage model outlined above are provided. The three situations include the role of classroom teacher of OAC English, co-author of a literature anthology and teacher resource for grade nine destreamed English classes, and facilitator of an Interdisciplinary Autonomous Learner programme for gifted/highly able adolescent learners. Thus, the three-stage curriculum model has been used and shown to be effective. My own, and my students' experiences in using the model, and the common ground discovered in all three roles, form the basis of the recommendations being made in the final chapter. Practical recommendations are made to teachers who are interested in implementing a curriculum which promotes independent learning for gifted adolescents. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Teaching mathematics means teaching learners to think – wrote Polya in How to Solve It? 1957. This paper intends to offer mathematics teachers suggestions for incorporating reading, writing, and speaking practices in the teaching of mathematics. Through explicit examples and explanations we intend to share ways of engaging students in deep learning of mathematics, especially using and producing written and oral texts. More specifically, we plan to broaden and deepen teachers’ understanding of strategies for guiding students’ thinking so that they grasp mathematical concepts and processes, and also bridge the divide between mathematical processes, and written and oral communication. This paper presents a core math lessons which provides numerous opportunities for the students to get actively engaged in the lesson and think about the new concepts, algorithms and ways of solving problems/ exercises. The lesson was designed for the 7th graders (13 year-olds). It was chosen to illustrate teaching by using reading and writing for understanding math processes. The teacher’s reflections after the lesson and some samples of the students’ work and feedback are included in the paper. The material in this paper is based on the author’s own extensive teaching experience; and her work in the Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking project in Romania.

Teaching mathematics means teaching learners to think – wrote Polya in How to Solve It? 1957. This paper intends to offer mathematics teachers suggestions for incorporating reading, writing, and speaking practices in the teaching of mathematics. Through explicit examples and explanations we intend to share ways of engaging students in deep learning of mathematics, especially using and producing written and oral texts. More specifically, we plan to broaden and deepen teachers’ understanding of strategies for guiding students’ thinking so that they grasp mathematical concepts and processes, and also bridge the divide between mathematical processes, and written and oral communication. This paper presents a core math lessons which provides numerous opportunities for the students to get actively engaged in the lesson and think about the new concepts, algorithms and ways of solving problems/ exercises. The lesson was designed for the 7th graders (13 year-olds). It was chosen to illustrate teaching by using reading and writing for understanding math processes. The teacher’s reflections after the lesson and some samples of the students’ work and feedback are included in the paper. The material in this paper is based on the author’s own extensive teaching experience; and her work in the Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking project in Romania.