This collection of twenty-five brief papers is based on a vital premise: that when classrooms become places where teachers engage in close-up studies of what learning is and how it happens, better teaching and learning result. Teacher-researchers, defining and studying educational issues at the classroom level, with the active help of students and colleagues, tend to see themselves in more productive ways, developing greater self-confidence and autonomy.

Twenty-three stimulating papers, including essays by Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, and William Strong, selected from the more than sixty presented at the Second Miami University Conference on Sentence Combining and the Teaching of Writing.Sentence combining has not only survived the paradigm shift in the teaching of writing but continues to stimulate provocative, creative thinking about the writing process itself. No longer an end in itself, but a tool, sentence combining has become a method of teaching about ways of thinking, of perceiving, and of organizing reality.