NWW Finland Fulbright: Week 2: Settling In

I am feeling pretty settled in at this point. I still don't know the main Helsinki street names, I can't even pronounce most of them, but I do know my way around and am getting lost way less often. Although there were many noteworthy events this week, the highlight was meeting my Fulbright buddy Taru and visiting her school. I also visited Elsie's new preschool and took a train to Lahti for a ski.

Finnish Snowman

1. Elsie's Preschool: I schedule a visit to Elsie's preschool this week, it is a very nice space. Although the school has 3-6 year-olds in it, Elsie's preschool class will separate out to work on their academics. There's about 2 hours dedicated to academics a day, the rest of the time is spent working on art, making music, reading stories (together and independently) and playing. Notice that they spend from 12:00-1:30 in the park, rain or shine!

Elsie's Schedule

Pictures of the Preschool

Children working of Ceramics

Elsie's preschool table

All the tables

Playspace

Physical education space in the basement

2. Fulbright Buddy: As part of the Fulbright program I was assigned a Fulbright buddy, my buddy is Taru Pohtola and she is fantastic.

We first met for coffee over which Steve and I bombarded her with a slew of questions. Below is a list of a few of the interesting things we learned

Instead of semesters, Finnish secondary schools have 5 terms/year, each term is ~7 weeks long. Classes meet 3 times/week for 75min/class.

Students are required to take a minimum of 75 courses, lasting a term each. About 2/3 of these are compulsory and the rest are freely chosen. Students usually take more than this minimum.

Taru has visited schools all over the U.S. and has developed the following opinions from her visits.

There is more trust in the Finnish system. I have posted a picture below that is evidence of this trust. In many classrooms I observed teachers' wallets, credit cards, keys, phones, etc. out on their front desks.

Exhibit A (Phone and Wallet)

The teaching load is much less for Finnish teachers, however, they do have more scheduled collaboration time than there is in the U.S. Below is a picture of Taru's teaching schedule for this year.

Taru's teaching schedule

U.S. teachers develop more personal connections with their students, with only 7 weeks/term it is hard to develop these relationships in Finland. You do not see too many student-teacher high-fives in Finnish hallways.

3. Visit to Martinlaakson Lukio: Taru arrange for a visit to her school, Martinlaakson Lukio. This was our first official observation and it was very eye-opening, the school was run very differently than the public schools I am used to in the U.S.. Below are a few notable observations:

The halls were very quite, one explanation for this is that students are not required to be in school when their classes are not in session.

There were a lot of student work spaces, little study nooks scattered throughout the hallways.

Students keep to themselves and generally do not interact with teachers in the hallways.

Nook 1

Nook 2

Nook 3

Foosball nook (there were a few of these.)

There are matriculation exams at the end of secondary school and this is what most students are working towards, individual course grades are not as important, although universities do consider them when admitting students. There's a lot of self-directed learning and self assessment in Finnish schools. One teacher that is known around the country for his work on self-directed learning is Pekka Peura. Taru arranged for us to observe one of his physics classes.

Pekka keeps track of student progress in a very unique and modern way. He has all of his students entered into a Google Sheet along with 60 course objectives. Students work through the objectives and change the color of the cell for that objective according to their mastery of it, the colors range from green (I could teach it to a friend) to black ( I don't want to learn this.) If a student is having a hard time with an objective then they can seek out another student who feels comfortable teaching that objective.

Pekka showing me the class Google Sheet

A student working independently with his Google Sheet open.

Group hard at work

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

School lunch is a very big deal in Finland. Fins believe everyone should have a nutritious hot meal and this meal is free for everyone.

Our meal

Drinks, the brown one in the back is nonalcoholic beer.

Bread table, baked fresh on the premises

After lunch we visited Johanna Parvinen's math class. She runs her class in a very similar self-directed manned to Pekka's, students are given a sheet with all the objectives and they check them off when they feel that they understand them. Johanna says that she hardly ever presents a lesson in front of the class, maybe once every few weeks. Students learn independently, from each other, and one-on-one from the teacher.

Objectives check-off sheet

Johanna helping a student

The whole class

At the end of the day we walked passed an open-air classroom where they were holding an entrepreneur competition on this specific day. For the competition, the teams were given a scenario with a goal. This class was assigned a city on the east coast of Finland, teams had to come up with a business that would increase tourism for the city. Teams were given some virtual startup money and then had to come up with a business plan. During the competition teams made an initial pitch to 3 judges from industry, teams then went out into the community to pitch the idea to citizens (they went to the train station), lastly they came back and gave a final pitch to the judges. The whole competition was really something, very professional. Unfortunately I did not get anyone's permission to publish their pictures so I will have to leave those photos out. We also went to a student-written rendition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves at the end of the day, it was all in Finnish, that made it a little difficult to follow, again I apologize but I can't post any pictures of the performance.

4. Ski in Lahti: To cap off the week we took a trip to Lahti, a ski town north of the city where the World Nordic Ski Championships will be held this year. The trails were well groomed and the terrain was intense!