Rethinking learner-centered teaching in early education: Lessons from a global practice perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines learner-centered pedagogy in early education from a global practice perspective, with particular focus on Uganda and other low- and middle-income contexts. Learner-centered teaching – grounded in constructivist theories of Piaget and Vygotsky – emphasizes active learning, collaboration, and student autonomy. Its relevance for early childhood lies in fostering problem-solving, creativity, and social-emotional skills from a young age. We synthesize international literature and field reports to map the current landscape of learner-centered approaches in early grades, noting examples from Africa, Asia, and Europe. In Uganda, the 2007 “thematic” curriculum reform explicitly aimed to deliver learner-centered instruction in local language but faced implementation barriers and yielded no clear learning gains. Common challenges across low-resource settings include large class sizes, inadequate materials, and weak teacher preparation. Innovative strategies – such as community-based preschool models in Kenya and policy supports for play-based learning – show promise in addressing these barriers. We conclude with policy implications for the United States, highlighting the need for robust teacher training, culturally responsive pedagogy, and equity-oriented early learning initiatives, supported by evidence from international research. Keywords: Learning centered Pedagogy, Early Childhood Education, Education Policy Reform, Global Comparative Education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".