Visible Teaching Theories and Strategies

Overview

Guided by the constructivism theory, visible teaching is a pedagogy that adopts technology to render the intuitive image of teaching content, process, outcome and contexts. Visible learning has its foundation in theories from cognitive psychology, constructivism, dual coding, etc., and aims to reduce the cognitive costs and learning burden. This aim helps to remove the impediments for learners in terms of information acquisition, handling and application, and therefore yielding efficient and quality learning and teaching. Visible learning characterises by its intuitive, efficient, media compatible and spatial features. Strategies to teach visibly include visualising the knowledge, skills, information, mindset, emotions, etc. With the steps ‘observation–exploration–experiment–implementation–adoption–innovation’ as the learning activity design model, teachers can create new ways, new strategies, new formats in teaching, reducing the cognitive costs of students in the learning process and alleviating their learning burden. Additionally, teachers can adjust students’ impression on concreteness and abstractness to enable efficient and quality classrooms.