The current “age of accountability” (Aasebø et al., 2017; Hopmann, 2008) brings about a new culture of learning in schools characterised among others by instruction based on constructivism. That is connected with balancing both cognitive activation of pupils and their acquiring of educational content. In our research, we use the framework concept of productive culture of teaching and learning, which is seen as a normative ideal to which all attempts to improve teaching and learning tend (c.f. Weinert, 1997; Wiater, 2005; Reusser, 2006). We are namely concerned with the areas of (1) cognitive activation of students while working with content, (2) clarity and structuredness of instruction, and (3) supportive learning climate and constructive work with mistakes.

However, there is a new challenge connected with the culture in educational reality – shedding the content. We lose the content when:

• we design and follow extremely broad/open or extremely narrow/closed/prescribed curricula;
• we realise extremely unfocused/rambling or extremely focused/inert/one-sided teaching and learning;
• we do not grasp students learning outcomes at all or when we exaggeratedly grasp them.

This research tries to show how teachers may avoid this problem.

A possible answer to this challenge might be in a re-turn to the tradition of Bildung and to content-focused Bildung-centred didactics. Various methodological approaches and instruments for analysing content transformations (relations between content to be taught and learned and content already taught and learned) were developed – e.g. The theory of didactical situations (Brousseau, 2002), Model of educational reconstruction (Komorek & Kattmann, 2008), Mimetic perspective in didactics (Willbergh, 2015). Building on these approaches, we tried to turn to the tradition of Bildung and outline the theoretical background for the content-focused approach to (research on) teaching and learning and developed a content-focused approach – the 3A procedure (Slavík et al., 2016).

The 3A-procedure is a valuable tool to study the nature of relational changes in the structure of relationships between educational aims (the desired state of students’ dispositions), contents (correlation between the individual fields and curriculum) and features of the learning environment (how the curriculum is realised). 3A procedure consists of three steps:

Annotation is a brief summary of the teaching and learning (further TL) situation and its context.

Analysis refers to a reconstruction of the situation. Conceptual structure diagrams are used to capture how the content was worked on, semantic-logical analysis provides grounds for suggesting alterations in TL situations. Within the conceptual structure diagram, we distinguish three levels: thematic (students’ experience with phenomena), concept (he field-specific knowledge and procedures) and competence (transdisciplinary aims). The relationships between levels are critical for the assessment of the integrity of instruction. The quality of instruction is seen as dependent on the integrity of instruction, i.e. on the quality of functional relationships between TL content, TL objectives and the activities of teacher and students. The better these three basic determinants of educational quality are integrated, the higher the quality of TL situation is. Interpretation of the individual components within the conceptual structure diagram may unveil potential deficiencies in the deep structure of the TL situation, which threaten its integrity. Such deficiencies are referred to as didactic formalisms (i.e. problems within the semantic and logical structure of educational content in TL situation; Gruschka, 2013). They are the starting point for formulation of alterations and prepare the ground for analytic generalisation.

Alteration is a thought experiment in which an alternative course of action is proposed and discussed. TL situations are assessed and categorised into one of the following levels: failing/undeveloped/enabling/supportive (failing and undeveloped situations need alterations). Based on that, an alternative course of action is suggested, reconsidered, and discussed within the professional community. 

The ultimate aim of the approach is to generalise findings from particular case studies to arrive at abstract and theoretical categories that will help explain patterns in the deep structure of instruction and bring a better understanding of the general aspects of teaching and learning quality. The paper addresses three RQ: (1) How is content transformed and meaning created in particular TL situations through communication and collaboration between students and the teacher? (2) What types of didactic formalisms occur, and what are their characteristics? (3) Which theoretical constructs explain the relationship between the determinants of the quality of the learning environment? The general context of our research is thus the methodology of case studies that we adopt for research in didactics. Case studies incorporated in the multiple-case study were based on the theory of content transformation and using the 3A procedure (Slavík et al., 2017). The case studies aimed to find such explanation and assessment of didactic phenomena that could lead to an analytical generalisation as described by Yin (2011, pp. 98–102); this in turn would make it possible to further theoretically verify the findings and help make use of them in practice. Particular case studies were developed between 2011 and 2022. More than 70 authors worked in teams that consisted of university teachers specialising in pedagogy/didactics and practitioners who either taught their own analysed lessons or had experience with teaching the same content. Case studies were based on didactic analyses of authentic TL situations captured on video in many different schools in the Czech Republic. A total of 67 case studies of TL situations realised in diverse contexts were carried out. Out of them, 44 case studies were selected for a more detailed analysis by means of purposive sampling (Patton, 1990), i.e. 138 TL situations in total. Work on didactic case studies was carried out in a recursive manner (Strauss, 1987, pp.18–20, 22; Kronick, 1997, pp. 60–63). The procedure consists of five steps along with peer feedback in a team of authors. Termination of the analytical process is brought by functional saturation (the state of knowledge that allows teachers to design and critically discuss alterations for improving teaching) in the 3A procedure. We were trying to find out the degree of integrity, which enables differentiation of TL situations into two basic categories: didactic formalism (a representative of lower integrity) and didactic excellence.

First, the quality of TL situations was assessed and failing situations (n=92) were excluded. Out of remaining 46 situations, 35% of situations (n=16) was evaluated as undeveloped, 52% (n=24) as enabling and 13% (n=6) as supportive. So far, we have deep results for didactic formalisms: We have identified several types of didactic formalism (concealed learning, stolen learning, misleading learning, inconcluded learning). Two prevalent types of didactic formalism will be described in detail; stolen cognition (identified in 16 case studies, i.e. 29%) and concealed cognition (24, i.e. 44%). Stolen cognition is characterised by a classroom situation where the teacher substitutes students’ cognitive activities with his/her own presentation of content and evaluation of learning. The cause of the failure is usually (a) disproportion between the task complexity and conditions for its solution (lack of time, non-adjustment to students’ capabilities etc.), or (b) insufficient analysis of content (teacher does not grasp relations among work with content and students’ previous experiences). Concealed cognition is characterised by teaching and learning situations where students’ cognitive processes in the course of their activities are separated from the development of basic concept knowledge. As a result, students do not understand what they are doing and how it relates to learning; they cannot really appreciate the cognitive benefits of what is taught. The reason for failure is predominantly teachers’ lack of analysis of content – students only handle the concepts as words to be memorised – “the content is emptying”. Lack of metacognition is a typical feature of these situations. Each type of didactic formalism can be simultaneously completed, divided into more distinct categories or rejected as inconvenient and replaced by another. For that reason, we consider the typology of didactic formalism as a result of never-ending recursive process, which is still open for further elaboration (specification) or innovation.

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