ABSTRACT
The theme of this chapter is democratic learning and its relationship to school effectiveness and improvement. There are several ways to interpret democratic learning. One is to see the learning that happens in schools as a preparation for life in future situations within a democratic society, so requiring a particular form of knowledge to be built up at school. Another way is to see essential learning as something distributed among different groups. In this view, learning to be democratic means that there is an equal distribution of important subgroups in a school population: the two genders, different ethnic groups or different socioeconomic groups. A third way to interpret this is to look at the rights of students and find out how these are treated by teachers and school principals. To be democratic, the learning that takes place at school needs to be based on real power sharing between the learner and the teacher. The views that children and young people hold need to be accorded respect by staff and learning seen as something that students own and have essential influence over.
