Purpose: The main aim of this article is to analyze Estonian civics and citizenship education. We focus on multi-level policy design and implementation, teachers' roles, and educational practices in the classroom. In order to achieve the aim, we analyzed the national curricula from the citizenship normative perspective, conducted interviews with…

Countries consider curriculum reform as an important and necessary measure to make schools enter the 21st century and respond to a fast-changing world. In recent years, many OECD countries have engaged in curriculum reform as a way to equip children with the knowledge, skills and competences needed for tomorrow. However, how to initiate such…

Teachers' curriculum ownership is increasingly gaining attention in many countries. It is particularly important that under the conditions of centralized curriculum-making, teachers as final implementers of curricular ideas identify themselves with these ideas. This study investigates Estonian upper secondary school teachers' views on the impact…

The aim of the paper is to research the important process of the history of the educational development of Estonia, the reform of the national school curriculum which began after the teacher's congress in 1987 and ended in 1996 when government approved the document. That reform was carried out in the context of thoroughgoing and dramatic…

Finding a balance between a centralised and decentralised curricular policy for general education and seeing teachers as autonomous agents of curriculum development is a recurrent issue in many countries. Radical reforms bring about the need to investigate whether and to what extent different parties - and first of all, teachers - are ready to…

The sustainability of technology education is related to a traditional understanding of craft and the methods used to teach it; however, the methods used in the teaching process have been influenced by the innovative changes accompanying the development of technology. In respect to social and economic development, it is important to prepare young…

This article aims to study the adoption of national curricula by vocational teachers. In the paper, we review the process of vocational education and training curriculum reform in Estonia over the last 20 years, and, in particular, the introduction of national curricula. As teachers should be considered the key agents of curricular change, we look…

Broadening the role of teachers in curriculum development was among the fundamental objectives of educational reforms in the formerly communist Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The research done so far, however, calls into question the degree to which teachers perceive the relevant changes in curriculum and their new role. This article first describes…

This article analyses teachers' experience in the period of educational change in Estonia from 1989 to 2010. We review the introduction of the new national curricula and national exams. We show how, in the teachers' experience, the period of change can be divided into two distinct periods. Firstly, the period of freedom and chaos in the early…

The article describes the development of the Estonian school mathematics syllabus in 1990-2005 on the context of changes in the national general education curriculum. The major steps of the development, the background and the main problems are observed: project of the Estonian mathematics syllabus from 1989; first mathematics syllabuses…