Devices to interest junior high school pupils in the study of French ..

Typewritten sheets in cover. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Bibliography: p. 82-87

Did transcendentalism influence the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne?

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universityhttps://archive.org/details/didtranscendenta00bur

Reflective Practices in Professional Learning Communities: A Case Study of the Missouri Professional Learning Communities Project

ABSTRACT Dewey (1933) provided the foundation for reflective practice in education with the notion that learning is not in the doing, but rather it is in the thinking about the doing that creates learning. Evidence is growing about the importance of reflection for improving teaching and learning practices to increase student achievement (York-Barr, et al., 2006). The professional learning community (PLC) has become the new catchphrase as schools engage in systems-change efforts for school improvement. DuFour, Eaker, and DuFour (2005) call professional learning communities the “most powerful strategy for sustained, substantive school improvement” (p.7). If reflective practice is a means by which teaching and learning improve and if professional learning communities provide a framework for system-wide school improvement, are the two interdependent? Using a mixed method, bounded case study research design, ten schools currently participating in the Missouri Professional Learning Communities Project (MO PLC) were selected for this study of the relationship between the level and extent of reflective practices and the implementation level of the professional learning communities process. Five schools previously identified as minimally implementing the PLC process and five schools identified as deeply implementing the PLC process were selected for the study. Using an online whole-staff survey and interviews with two school leaders in each school, data was collected and analyzed using a concurrent triangulation strategy. The Reflective Practice Spiral (York-Barr, 2006) provided the basis for the pre-determined themes used to code the interviews. The findings of this study suggest a relationship between the level and extent of reflective practice and the implementation level of the professional learning communities process. Certainly, findings from this study can support recommendations for future work of the MO PLC Project, as well as provide a springboard for further study of other school improvement initiatives supported by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

Typewriter in business

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University, 1933. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Professions of love : the discursive construction of love and romance in intimate heterosexual relationships

For this thesis, my aim was to deconstruct the notion of heterosexual love in order to question if and how current stories of love are involved in producing gender inequality. Using discourse analysis, informed by feminist theory, I analysed, in detail, qualitative interviews with eleven women and eleven men about their most important intimate heterosexual relationships and their experiences of love. The traditional view of romantic love as a symbol of freedom and redemption has been challenged by feminist arguments that romantic love obscures male privilege in intimate heterosexual relationships. Mainstream social psychological research has tended to measure and categorize 'love' with little regard to wider historical and social contexts which means that the few in-depth explorations of the complex meanings of love are primarily sociological. Where some research has suggested that gender inequality may proceed from women's investment in romance and men's in emotional illiteracy (e.g. Jackson, 1993; Langford, 1999), others conceive that a wider democratization of social life is producing a shift to more rational and equitable intimate relationships (e.g. Giddens, 1992; Illouz, 1997). My findings demonstrate that talk of love is extremely complex while also cliched and inchoate. I identified two broad and pervasive discourses, in tension with each other - the discourse of romantic love and the work discourse of love and intimacy. The romantic discourse was inextricably inscribed with discourses of emotion where the work discourse was associated with doing rather than feeling. The work discourse allowed the male interviewees, in particular, to construct relationships as contexts for their own personal growth work and exercise of expertise. The democratization of heterosexual love may not be well underway if a shift to rational intimacy involves a transformation of romantic feeling into a narcissistic discourse of personal success. I also identified how male privilege was instantiated in discourses of infidelity

A study of the group experiences of children with limitations due to illness.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Use of a Needs Assessment to Develop a Curriculum for an Internal Medicine Boot Camp for Graduating Medical Students

Transitioning between medical school and internship is stressful with newly increased responsibilities. One way to prepare fourth year medical students for residency is through a boot camp course. Boot camps are more frequently cited in the surgical literature as a way to increase the confidence of students entering surgical internship, but may offer similar benefits to students entering an internal medicine internship. With a 5-point Likert -cale survey, we conducted a needs assessment of fourth-year students entering internal medicine internship, interns, and hospitalist attendings. We asked students about their current comfort level in 23 topics encountered in internal medicine. For interns, we asked them to reflect on their comfort level with each topic at entrance into internship. For attendings, we asked them to rate the importance of each topic. Our results showed that over half of current interns indicated feelings of discomfort with a greater number of topics than did students (16 vs. 6). Interestingly, inpatient and outpatient procedures showed very high levels of discomfort by students and interns though were rated as being unimportant by hospitalist faculty. Using data from our needs assessment, we sought to create a curriculum for graduating medical students entering an internal medicine internship that would address their verbalized needs as well as inferred needs defined by faculty responses. Findings that our fourth-year students reported higher comfort level with topics than internal medicine interns reflecting back on their comfort level may be a result of different medical school preparations, response bias, or recall bias