Learning and Well-Being in Transitions: How to Promote Pupils’ Active Learning Agency?

Comprehensive schools around Europe are currently faced with a diversity of multidimensional educational reforms. In Finland, the most recent of the pedagogical school reforms is the implementation of undivided basic education (UBE). The current reform is based on the Finnish school legislation and regulations emphasizing constructivist views of learning which emphasize an active and collaborative nature of learning. The aim of the reform is to support pupils in their learning path through the various transitions of their school careers and guarantee everybody equal opportunities to get a basic education (Basic Education Act, 628/1998; National Core Curriculum for Basic Education, 2004). More specifi cally, the reform aims to ensure a consistent, coherent, and understandable comprehensive school education for all pupils, both in terms of learning different subjects in meaningful continuums, and in terms of safe and supportive everyday learning environments.