In the last post, you saw examples of an educational environment where the entire community, children, teachers, and administrators felt at home actively learning and teaching. Probably my favorite quote was one teacher, who was asked how she knew the students were learning in the absence of high stakes summative testing, replied, “at the end of the day, when I see the children’s eyes are smiling, I know I am doing my job.”
As I’ve talked to people back home, the immediate reactions were, “that’s great, but it can’t work here.” Here were some representative reactions, and my responses.
That works in Finland, but Finland is a monoculture.
The first school we visited was a neighborhood school in a diverse low SES community. There are migrants, there are students who are not fluent in Finnish.
Finland is small, that won’t work in urban settings.
Both schools were in Helsinki, which has a population over 600,000, and the greater metropolitan area’s population is over 1.3 million.
That might work if you were starting a school, but you can’t expect to change existing schools.
The second school was new, and was designed with this type of instruction in mind. The first school was over 30 years old and started its transformation about five years ago and was just as remarkable.
We have schools like that here, but only in schools where they can shuffle off non-performing students. We don’t have that luxury in public schools.
These were public schools. In fact, virtually all education is public education in Finland, and even private schools need to meet the same requirements and standards as public schools. When students encounter learning obstacles, the school works with the students to overcome them.
What if our first thoughts weren’t, “let me figure out why that won’t work here,” but,” what would we love to build?” What if our questions were vision-based instead of fear-based? In education, that would probably entail constructing an education system whose goal is to prepare students to be adults and that’s designed to operate the way people naturally learn and teach.
There seem to be three pillars foundational to the Finnish type of system: Humanism, Trust, and Fun.
Humanism values the worth of each person. The Deputy Mayor of Helsinki told us that their goal is to make Helsinki the most equitable and effective place to learn in the world. She herself was a refugee from Afghanistan. The Ministry of Education said that their goal was to help children become optimistic adults who find solutions to the problems they and society face. HAMI and Kiipula Vocational schools said there goals were to honor and value every single person by helping them find out how they can contribute.
The word Trust came up in each conversation. You saw in the last post what this looks like. Students working together without direct supervision, both in and out of the classroom. Teachers learning and trying new things and using the results as feedback for progress regardless of whether they matched, exceeded, or even fell short of expectations. Administrators and policy makers not knowing what exactly students and teachers were doing but confident that the system was working and everyone would adjust to whatever happened because the end goals were clear and the different actors could obtain help if and when they needed it.
Fun was evident in that administrators, educators, and students enjoy what they were doing to such an extent that they were internally motivated to work hard and excel.
These three pillars are not just lofty goals, they are guidelines for planning and practice. Here is how HAMK, an Applied Science University that prepares teachers, benchmarked education systems in order to target areas for continuous improvement:
Basing their focus on these priorities, here is how HAMK then grows their expertise and capabilities:
In the schools themselves, teachers across the school work together to create learning opportunities for children through Phenomenon-based learning, or inspiring students through problems that interest them.
And this is the framework for how to guide students through learning activities: the children setting their own learning goals, self-assessing what they already know, obtaining the knowledge and skills they need, and then sharing their results.
In this way, children aren’t learning by artificially dividing their time into “subjects” like biology or geometry or literature, and groups of students aren’t being segregated or solely working individually, children and teachers are holistically and inclusively learning together.
Despite our immediate reactions of “this won’t work here,” the Finnish Educational framework can work in any country or society.
- Begin with the end in mind
- Value each person
- Build and reinforce mutual trust
- Learn through activities inspired by our natural curiosity
Isn't this a path worth considering?
Considering this is possible is a mindshift. If you want to learn how to Mindshift, consider joining educators from Washington and New York State taking the Mindshifting class starting on November 1.