Background

ACTS – Pedagogical Approaches: making thinking visible, verbalizing thinking, and metacognition in learning

Visibility in learning means: 1. making student learning visible to teachers, 2. making teacher actions visible to students, and 3. making the importance of learning visible, 4. emphasizing learning over teaching.  At the heart of visible learning is sufficient feedback and the desire for feedback.

Verbalizing one’s own thinking is making one’s thinking visible. Different means of verbalizing and supporting this verbalizing help the children to understand their own thinking.

Metacognition is awareness of one’s own cognitive thinking, learning, knowing and acting. The student’s holistic metacognitive awareness enables the student to develop into an expert in their own learning.

The Finnish National Curriculum (2014) emphasizes children’s thinking and learning to learn skills (L1).

The Finnish national curriculum for basic education (2014) considers children to be independent and active actors. Children should be given more opportunities for independent thinking, and teacher’s role is to act as a learning facilitator.

In the curriculum, thinking skills and learning to learn mean many things: reflecting on one’s own inner knowledge, building new knowledge, problem solving, argumentation, reasoning, analyzing, critical thinking, combining different perspectives, and ethical thinking.