ABSTRACT
Schools of the 21st century should be a ‘learning community’ where students learn together, teachers learn together for professional development and even parents learn together through participating in school reform. This definition corresponds to the public mission for the human rights of learning and professional autonomy. This idea, which I invented 30 years ago, has deeply captured teachers in Japan, and then grassroots school reform spread nationwide. Today, about 350 pilot schools are active, and thousands of schools are challenging to implement the School as Learning Community (SLC) reform.
Recently, the SLC approach has spread its wings to Asian countries and areas, such as South Korea, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thai, and is recognized as one of the most powerful school reforms for innovation in the world. This chapter display the common features and diversity of critical issues and the contexts of SLC in Asia.
