Changing Views of Teaching and Learning

Reform efforts to strengthen teaching and learning in the classroom, are taking place within an increasingly broader context than they have in the past. Goals of educational reform and the thinking that underlies these goals, are rapidly changing. Educational reforms are moving from their historical emphasis on access and improved system maintenance and control, to wider concerns about increased educational quality, relevance, effectiveness, and efficiency. Reformers are also looking to changes that result in more equitable distributions of opportunity, resources, and outcomes. Furthermore, the thinking about how educational systems are governed, managed, and financed is far more likely today to include more decentralized and shared responsibility models than in the past, and more likely to consider teachers, families, communities, and non-governmental players as active participants in the process. Even conceptions about student and system performance, have changed significantly in many countries. Most important of all, policymakers tend to be more cognizant of the fact that in order to increase children’s learning, real educational change must have an impact at the classroom level.1