Over the last 10 years, the education system has witnessed a shift from content-based to outcome-based curricula. Within schools, among teachers and in didactics the shift has manifested itself in enhanced interest in how learning outcomes are operationalized into learning objectives in study regulations and lesson plans (programmatic and planned curriculum) and in formalized assessment of learning. Educational research supports the relevance of focus on transparency in expected learning objectives and assessment of learning. However, research also clearly underlines that also students’ interpretation and sense-making of the planned and taught curricula (the experienced curricula) and participants’ process-related assessment of learning play a fundamental role for what they learn (learned curriculum). However the process-related interpretation of signs of learning are almost entirely unexplored in didactics.

The didactic relevance of a focus on how the curricula (explicit, implicit, planned and experienced) extend the horizon of valuable learning is evident, since learning serves as the fundamental concept for reflection of teaching. The relevance is substantiated in empirical research, which underpins the relevance from both a student and a teacher perspective. Among others, Hattie & Yates (2013) and Stiggins (2005) show that students’ perceptions of success and failure are fundamental for achievement and motivation. And perceptions of success and failure can be described as intimately linked to students’ expectations of the curriculum and experiences of how communication and behavior are recognized as signs of learning. From a teacher perspective, the didactic relevance is linked to the assessment of and for learning. In particular, over the last ten years, process-related assessment for learning has enjoyed increased scholarly attention in both primary (Høihilder, 2009) and higher education (Knight,  2004). Empirical research shows that transparency in expectations is essential for students’ learning and that process-related reflection on the relation between teaching and learning is a cornerstones of quality teaching (Hattie, 2009; Helmke, 2009; Meyer, 1994; Nordenbo, Larsen, Tiftikçi, Wendt, & Østergaard, 2008; Weinert, 2000) and fundamental for didactic rationality (Keiding & Qvortrup, 2014).

Parallel with the focus on assessment of learning, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is characterized of an immense preoccupation with learning theories, especially situated learning theory (Qvortrup & Keiding, 2015). However, teaching’s observation strategies cannot be taken directly learning theoretical conceptualizations of learning, since they conceptualizes learning as process, and teaching are referred to look for indications or signs of learning.

Learning serves as the fundamental concept for reflection of teaching, but teaching cannot promote and observe learning directly. It must produce its own observation strategies, which align with teaching as social interaction. It must, in other words, look for “signs of learning” based on changes in communication and behavoir. In this sense, learning as it is conceptualized in teaching can be described as a semantic construction that “indicates that one cannot observe how information triggers far reaching consequences by bringing about partial structural changes in a system without interrupting its self-identification.“ (Luhmann, 1995, p. 111)

This paper discusses and exemplifies how teaching’s concept of learning can be understood. The theoretical framework for the construction and discussion of teaching’s concept of learning is found insecond-order systems theory as described by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (Luhmann, 1995, 2002b) and in system theoretical didactics (Keiding & Qvortrup, 2014). The system theoretical point of departure offers a highly systematic analytical tool for distinguishing between various curricula (Keiding & Qvortrup, 2014), for describing how interpretations of expectations for valuable learning both produce and are products of the curricula, and for describing the taught curriculum as an emerging and contingent form in its own right (Keiding & Qvortrup, 2014). 

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