The initiatives for educational effectiveness experienced 3 waves of movements. Each wave had its own paradigm in conceptualizing the nature of education and its effectiveness and formulating related initiatives for improvement of educational practice in the classroom. This article aims to discuss how the conceptualization and characteristics of the effective classroom are changed with the paradigm shift from the traditional site-bounded paradigm toward the new Contextualized Multiple Intelligences (CMI)-triplization paradigm. With the support of empirical data, the profiles of effective and ineffective classrooms in the 1st and 3rd waves are mapped and discussed, and some implications are drawn for research and development of a new type of classroom effectiveness. (Contains 5 tables and 4 figures.)