First day in Finland
A visit to a Swedish-speaking Finnish School!
Today I was able to visit my first of six schools I’ll be able to see while in Finland over the next ten days! Thanks to my generous host Jeanette, I had a lovely home to sleep in, beautiful surroundings to wake up to and jog in, and a lovely little rural school on an island called Nargu to visit today:
I learned today that several parts of Finland are mostly-Swedish speaking! As a result, several schools have Swedish as the language of instruction, and students can actually go all the way through university entirely in Swedish, and even train to be teachers or doctors in Swedish.
I find this fascinating, partly because according to several students and teachers I spoke with, Swedish is seen as second-status to Finnish, yet the government still provides all of the resources for those who prefer Swedish as their mother tongue to not only maintain their literacy in that langauge but also conduct all of their formal education in it! This stands in stark contrast to my experiences working with English Language Learners (ELLs) in the USA, who often are very capable and literate in their mother tongue (be it Spanish, Hmong, Chinese, etc) but have no way to demosntrate that knowledge because our state tests are not printed in their native langauge.
Before taking off for Finland, the world’s Educational Mecca, I posed the question to my colleagues using social media:
“While I’m sure in many ways comparing the US school system to Finland’s will be like comparing apples and oranges, I’m still so eager to observe and be a fly on the wall in 6 different schools and classrooms with different teachers during the next 10 days! Does anybody have questions you’re curious to ask about their school system?”
In this post I will provide 3 sets of questions I received from teachers who are colleagues of mine in the USA and responses I was able to collect from my first teacher host here in Finland: Jeanette, a Swedish-speaking, 7–9th grade math, physics, and biology teacher, and her colleagues.
Question #1
If it was in your power, what would you change about your day/what you would teach/ how you would teach:…?
Interestingly, many of Jeanette’s answers expressed frustrations that are super similar to what I think many of us would say in the United States:
- Jeanette expressed that there is one big problem —excessive paperwork! there are lots of forms to fill out, and while it is important to provide individualized plans for students (which I saw a lot of in action today — especially in the primary level, most students worked at their own pace and had a choice in their own individualized homework), often much of the time spent filling out forms could be better used towards actually sitting down and really helping children.
- A desire for longer blocks of instructional time. The current schedule has students in 6 lessons per day with several 10–15 minute breaks springkled in-between for recess, free time, and lunch.
- While the breaks are good and definitely help students maintain focus during their (fewer and shorter) lessons, and the overall school day is shorter in length than a school day in the USA, Jeanette mentioned that it would be better if there was a blocked schedule for all classes to allow extended lessons, espcially for math and science. A big initiative in Finland currently is outdoor education, and while she loves this way of teaching, Jeanette noted that there is often barely time to get outside to really teach when a lesson is only 45 minutes long. (However, I also noticed that when a group of teachers of primary and secondary students were together and this topic came up, much like I’ve observed in the USA, primary teachers wanted shorter lessons if anything, thinking even 45 minutes was a bit too long for their younger students, whereas secondary teachers often wanted students to have fewer classes overall, but with longer blocks of time for each class to allow for deeper learning).
- Jeanette and several of her colleagues also referenced that a new system /curriculum is being rolled out in Finland. While she and many of her colleagues already have been collaborating for years, using projects, and making various cross-curricular connections, the new system will now require such endeavors. She is in full support of this system but noted that perhaps some older teachers who are a bit more traditional will find the change challenging.
Question #2
I’m curious if they’re feeling as overwhelmed as teachers do [in the USA]. Is there time for meetings (professional as well as student meetings)? Do they do project based learning or do they use more traditional classroom models? Are there standards and state tests? How do they ensure student growth?
Jeanette’s answers to these questions, along with a few of my observations from my visit, are below:
- Jeanette’s is a very small school (90 students grade K-9), so, if anything, she knows students too well, although even in a bigger school, she always felt she had sufficient time to meet with her own students when needed for extra support. She also mentioned having a homework club after school for students to opt in for extra support with homework or studying for an upcoming math test.
- Due to the size of her school, it is sometimes a challenge to collaborate professionally with colleagues because many teachers teach in multiple schools in order to be considered full time (Jeanette is one of just two full-time teachers in her building). As a result of their travel between buildings, teachers’ schedules may not allow for consistent time to sit down together and work in the same building.
- The tradeoff, however, is a greater degree of freedom and autonomy than teachers in the USA enjoy. Teachers are considered “full time” at around 20 hours of lessons per week*. The other hours are up to them to grade, plan, collaborate how and where they see fit, as I’ve observed in most countries around the world. Some teachers have a full day or a couple of mornings or afternoons off every week. Jeanette and other teachers expressed feeling that they had adequate amounts of vacation and time to take care of personal and professional needs during their days. *Note that some subjects, such as “mother tongue” — Swedish (like our English I suppose) are considered full time at 18 lessons per week, because of the increased amount of grading, while others, such as home economics are considered full time at 23 lessons per week because they do not typically assign or need to follow up with homework. Teachers seem to understand, respect, and accept these differences as logical and equitable despite the fact that their hours are not exactly the same.
- No matter what, there are always 2–3 staff meetings/month, which last from 1.5–2 hrs, and allow for dissemination of new important information from the government, and time for collaboration andplanning under this new system. A part of the new system is that every teacher will have 135 hours per school year for collaboration with parents, other teachers, etc., and full autonomy over when and how they use those 135 hours. (As of now they have about 3 hrs a week for collaboration, and some some do too much while others too little).
- Jeanette said that she herself does not generally feel overwhelmed, but thinks that perhaps some teachers do feel that way; it can vary greatly and depends in great part on your class makeup, your # of students, their learning difficulties etc. (Note: I was suprprised to learn that students will learning difficulties are fully included in the general ed classroom, with some pull out for intervention as needed. I thought I had heard otherwise, at least for ESL sgtudents, that they attended a separate school for the first several years until their language level was up to speed, but either I was mistaken about this or it has changed). If a class has a few kids with special needs, there will be another adult / teacher aide in the room to help out. I saw two classes today where a class of 7–10 students had 2 adults teaching! While these were fantastic student: teacher ratios, apparently they are not the norm, instead they just represent a dip in the current enrollment in this small, rural island school.
- The Finnish school system is transitioning from more traditional means of instruction to incorporating more project-based learning (Jeanette does lots of projects in physics andchemistry but again time is a limiting factor).
- There is a standardized test in 6th grade, but it’s not that you have to do it, it’s more an opportunity to take part in it. There are also standardized tests in 9th grade, in Math or English , but not in every school; the Finnish government picks a few schools and classes at random to test each year, the teacher and kids find out about a month in advance, and nobody teaches to the test. The kids also told me that in their entire K-9 schooling experience, they had had perhaps 2 standardized tests, that they were very easy and not stressful at all, and that they bore little to no relation to what they did in the classroom each day.
- Ensuring growth? — this can be hard in a school as small as Jeanette’s, (we’re talking some classes of 3–4 students, with a max class size of 12!) because student scores can vary a lot year to year, and some kids also just don’t care (for example, both the 8th and 9th grade groups of kids openly and unabashedly admitted they had stopped doing all homework!) Jeanette gives her students a score for the year, and then, if her stuents are selected at random for a standardized test, the only real accountability is that the score she gives students should kind of match the state score —it’s just nice to see how they manage the test, she said. There is no positive or negative outcome for the teacher or students based on the scores, however.
- The PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) is given every 3 years, also to random schools and random children around the country, nobody is ever sure who is or will be tested or how or why they are selected. The PISA measures 15 year olds’ skills and knowledge across a variety of educaiton systems around the world and Finland’s high scores on it are the basis for the prevailing notion that the Finnish education system is the best system in the world. I find it ironic yet deeply satisfying that nobody in Finland cares much about or teaches to any of these tests, yet their students excel on them (or maybe that’s why they excel?)
Question #3:
Do they teach all kids? In other words does every teenager in Finland go to and graduate from high school? If not, what happens to those who don’t attend?
This was a great question because the answer revealed a lot about the structure of the Finnish school system, much of which was new to me.
Schooling is compulsory from ages 6–16 in Finland. There are various levels of schooling including:
- Kindergarten: not required, but available starting around 1 year old — government subsidized, single parents receive more support. Parental leave is also highly subsidized — you can take up to 3 years and have your position held with some pay before returning to work after having a child. Very rare in Finland for a child to be in “kindergarten” — like our daycare — before 1 year of age.
- Preschool: required — 6 years old — usually in a separate building from primary
- Ala koulu (aka Ala aste): Primary School: required — from 1st-6th grade (~7 years old — 13 years old)
- Ylä koulu (aka Ylä aste): Secondary School: required— from 7th-9th grade (~13–16 years old)
After 9th grade, students have two (sometimes three) options:
- Upper Secondary School (“Gymnasium”, same name used by most of Europe for what is essentially college prep school) — usually lasts 3–4 years, but can be done in 2 years. → this is the route students who are university-bound follow.
- Vocational School — go to school to learn a trade and then either continue on for more extensive training or begin working directly after.
When I asked students in a few different classes what their future plans were, it was pretty evenly split down the middle: about half intended to go on to Gymnasium and later University (which is paid for in full by the government, along with a housing stipend) and the other half were planning to attend a Vocational School. I also learned that this split of half and half was pretty representative of students around Finland, so it seems that they are much more comfortable with the idea that not everbody needs to or is well suited to attend university. Very few had any idea as yet of what they wanted to study, regardless of the route they inteded to follow. It was interesting to be having conversations we usually have with our 18-year-old seniors with 16-year-olds in what is Finland’s 9th grade — I kept thinking that in a way they were like freshmen (although the age of our sophomores) and in a way like seniors. It felt particularly odd to me when one girl said she was following neither of these paths but instead learning to work with horses and moving out at the age of 15! When I expressed surprise and asked if this was common, they all seemed to think it was! Kids are clearly a bit more independent earlier on in Finland than they are in the States.
A third post-secondary option for Finnish students is like Denmark’s efter-skole system. If I remember correctly it is called Folk skole and is kind of like a gap year — students can choose specialized schools for drama, art, etc. and study for a year, improve their test scores, and then eventually move on to one of the options above.
Jeanette did mention that there is a slowly growing probelm where students choose a path and then drop out of it when they aren’t successful. At the moment these students usually just find a job in a shop or restaurant and work, but some are a drain on a socialist system that relies on everybody pulling together in order to provide universal healthcare and insurance for all. There is some worry that in 5–10 years this may become unsustainable.
After a day in a tiny, Swedish-speaking K-9 school with just 90 students total, and class sizes of 4–12, I am eager to go to a primary school tomorrow on the mainland and see what differences (and probably similarities too) I can observe! One similarity I’m sure I’ll see: just like in other Scandinavian countries I’ve visited around the world (Norway, Sweden, and Denmark), kiddos in Finland remove their shoes in the classroom:
If you want to see more of my travels to schools around the world check out the Map Mates Facebook page at www.facebook.com/mapmates
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