1 Curriculum change as learning: In search of better implementa‐tion Pasi Sahlberg Curriculum change is a learning process for teachers and for their schools. Good understanding of change and clear conception of curriculum are necessary conditions for im‐proved implementation of new curriculum into practice. The key message of this presentation can be crystallized into three conclusions. (1) Successful curriculum development requires better use of ‘change knowledge’ ‐ failure is often a result of neglecting it. Policy‐makers, education leaders and teachers need to know more about the drivers of successful curriculum change in schools. There‐fore, learning about educational change and its key features should become inte‐gral elements of any serious curriculum reform process. (2) Re‐conceptualizing curriculum. Many curriculum reforms are based on how the curriculum has traditionally been organized. As a consequence, many curricula have become overloaded, confusing and inappropriate for teachers and students. Therefore, curriculum orientation should shift from a curriculum as product model to a curriculum as process model. This would also transform the role of the curricu‐lum from a purely technical document into a more comprehensive idea that also serves as guideline for school improvement. (3) Changing the way teachers teach and students learn requires specific approaches. In‐service training of teachers is not enough. If curriculum reform aims at changing the ways students learn and teachers teach, more sophisticated implementation strategies are required. Therefore, helping teachers to create professional learning communities and schools to learn from each other are recommended approaches. The myth of change Curriculum reforms are all about change. Nations, states, local communities and schools renew their curricula because their existing ones are not what they should be, or simply because there is a belief that changing the curriculum will also bring expected improve‐ments into classrooms. Whatever the drivers for the global curriculum reforms are, every reform architect is facing the question of how change eventually will happen. Only a few of those who initiate and authorize these reforms will be asked later on why the intended change didn’t happen as expected. Change is learning. Undermining this characteristic of change – or learning – has led many education developers in general and curriculum reformers in particular to adopt over‐simplistic approaches in trying to change the existing practices and modes of thinking in schools. Curriculum change efforts are typically labeled as implementation or transmission of intended curriculum into classroom practice in schools. A common means of this transmission is the diffusion of information to raise the awareness of re‐form, in‐service training of teachers to improve their knowledge and relevant skills and dissemination of support materials, such as teachers’ guides and educational pamphlets to parents, to back‐up the intended change. In many ways the problem of curriculum change is similar to the problems related to understanding human learning through be‐haviorist or positivist perspectives. For a long time human learning was explored and explained using positivist sci‐entific models, especially experimental behaviorist psychology, as a deterministic and externally observable change (Pinar et al., 1995). This means that by knowing and ma‐nipulating the stimuli, or input of the learning process, we are able to control the re‐sponse, or output of the learning process. In this way, complex learning was reduced to a simple sequence of stimulus and response, in other words, learning was explained through multiple linear stimulus‐response sequences. What