Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms pdfdrive com

References
Allianssi (2016). Nuorista Suomessa. Helsinki: Allianssi.
Hargreaves, A. and Shirley, D. (2012). The Global Fourth Way. The quest for educational excellence.
Thousand Oaks: Corwin.
OECD (2001). Knowledge and Skills for Life. First results from PISA 2000. Paris: OECD.
Sahlberg, P. (2015). Finnish Lessons 2.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland.
New York: Teachers College Press.

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Introduction
IN MY FIRST YEAR AS A CLASSROOM TEACHER IN ARLINGTON,
Massachusetts, I was on the fast track to burnout. On weekdays I would arrive at
my school around 6:30 A.M. and exit sometime in the evening, usually with a
backpack full of teaching guides. When I wasn’t at school, I tried disconnecting
from the work, but I couldn’t. At breakfast I anxiously pored over my lesson
plans, and in the evening, as I lay in bed I obsessed about all of the things I was
doing “wrong.” On a typical night I’d wake up four or five times. Sometimes I
felt so anxious in the morning that I’d run to the bathroom in my apartment and
throw up—gross, I know.
Before starting this first year of classroom teaching, I was so enthusiastic, so
confident that I’d love this job. But when October arrived, I started to admit to
myself that I was hating this job. It wasn’t bringing me joy. The opposite was
taking place, actually.
My Finnish wife, Johanna, was very worried about me. She warned that if I
didn’t slow down I’d need to take a leave of absence. I said, “Never.” Johanna
wondered why I insisted on working nonstop. She told me about her Finnish
friend in Helsinki, a first grade teacher just like me, who worked no more than
six hours every day, including an hour or two of prep. When she left her public
school around 2:00 P.M., she left all of her work behind, too.
I assumed that Johanna misunderstood her friend’s workload. Or, I reasoned,
if my wife had the facts straight, her friend wasn’t a good teacher. Good
teachers, I told my wife, don’t do short workdays. In fact, I explained, they push
themselves—to the limit.
“Not in Finland,” Johanna said.
After my wife graduated from Finnish high school, she spent a few months
working as a substitute teacher in Helsinki, which provided her with a behind-
the-scenes look at the working lives of Finland’s educators. In Finnish schools,
teachers and students typically have a fifteen-minute break built into every hour
of class, and, in Johanna’s experience, most educators would spend their breaks

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of class, and, in Johanna’s experience, most educators would spend their breaks
in the lounge—drinking coffee, chatting with colleagues, and flipping through
magazines. It sounded, given my American teaching experience, pretty
farfetched.
At my Massachusetts school, during my extended lunch block—usually my
only scheduled break during my workday—I’d often work through the free time,
zigzagging across my American classroom with a peeled banana, nibbling on-
the-go as I prepped for afternoon lessons.
Throughout my first year of classroom teaching, my Finnish wife was doing
her best to convince me that there was another way to teach. And not just survive
but thrive. I wasn’t buying it, though.
My reality, which I shared with many American teachers, seemed too
different from those teachers in Finland. I didn’t have those fifteen-minute
breaks scattered throughout the day. My last class was still in session when
Johanna’s friend would leave her school at 2 P.M. And I had, from my
perspective, a mountain of classroom prep waiting for me after I waved goodbye
to my first graders around 3:00 P.M.
During my rookie year of classroom teaching, I was typically putting in
twelve-hour days, and somehow I thought this made me a much better teacher
than Johanna’s friend. But by the end of that year, I knew I was clearly the
weaker educator. A terrible lack of work–life balance had caught up to me, and I
was brimming over with stress and anxiety. Worst of all, the job of teaching was
no longer joyful, and my lack of satisfaction seemed to be rubbing off on my
students. Those little kids often looked miserable, too.
That school year, I remember a veteran colleague telling me that 50 percent
of American teachers leave the profession within five years. And I thought I was
going to be one of those early dropouts. In late February, my anxiety and level of
sleep deprivation had become so intense that I could no longer prepare lessons
for the next day of school. I remember having sessions at my desk, where I’d
spend minutes staring blankly at my planner. One late afternoon, after another
fruitless hour of classroom prep, I returned home and collapsed on the kitchen
floor, lying speechless on the ground while my wife pleaded that I take a break.
Humbly, after weeks of sleepless nights, I picked up the phone and requested a
leave of absence.
I felt ready to move on from the profession and pretend that it had just been a
bad dream. But I also wondered if my Finnish wife was right.
Was it possible to teach and thrive? Even in an American classroom?
Three years later, Johanna and I decided to move to Finland. It wasn’t
because I wanted to flee American education. On the contrary: I didn’t want to
leave. I was still teaching at the same school, grateful to have survived that

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leave. I was still teaching at the same school, grateful to have survived that
embarrassing first year. After my month-long leave of absence, I had received
valuable support and experience, and, over time, I was starting to tap into the
joys of teaching, despite feeling physically and emotionally exhausted when I
returned home from school every day.
The year before we moved to Helsinki, I was teaching full-time, completing
graduate coursework, and working several part-time jobs. All things considered,
I wasn’t spending nearly as much time at home as I would have wished—and
maybe, if I was honest with myself, I was slowly starting to burn out again. We
decided to move to Finland, where we hoped for a slower pace, especially during
our children’s early years. (Today we have two children under five years old.)
When I announced our plan to settle in Helsinki, my American principal
remarked that it was a career move for me. I remember laughing at the idea,
because it felt like the opposite. I was prepared, in Finland, to stop teaching all
together, just to live a more balanced life. We purchased our one-way tickets to
Helsinki without knowing if I would even have a job.
In late June 2013, one month before moving overseas, I still lacked a job as a
classroom teacher, but I received a curious e-mail one morning from a Helsinki
principal. I had contacted her in March, along with several other Finnish
principals, and when I hadn’t heard from any of them, I had stopped hoping. But
there in my inbox that June morning was this message, which invited me to chat
about the possibility of teaching an English-speaking fifth grade class at a
Helsinki public school. My jaw dropped.
Later that week over Skype the Finnish principal interviewed me, and at the
end of the conversation she offered me the position. I was over the moon, and I
gratefully accepted the job. But then I began to worry: what was I signing up for
exactly?
I heard, like so many Americans, that Finnish education was top-notch. But,
in practice, what did that mean? Johanna had already told me bits of information
about Finnish schools—the short days and the fifteen-minute breaks, mostly.
And in one education documentary, I learned that Finland’s fifteen-year-olds
consistently performed well on a set of international tests called the PISA
(Programme for International Student Assessment), which measures critical-
thinking skills in the areas of reading, math, and science. All told, I knew very
little about Finnish education when I signed up for that fifth grade teaching job
in Helsinki.
Regardless, I was embarking on a two-year journey to see Finland’s school
system from the inside. It was an uncertain destination, where I expected to
struggle to assimilate. And I confess that I would struggle, but not necessarily in
the ways that my fellow American teachers might expect.

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Typically, a person who moves from one country to another experiences
culture shock, the phenomenon of feeling lost in an unfamiliar environment. But
for me, given that my wife is Finnish and I had visited her home country about a
dozen times before moving, I mostly avoided culture shock, except for one area
of my life: the workplace.
My Helsinki school felt like a foreign land, a place where I’d find new
expectations and new rules to follow, and in that very different context, I found
myself rethinking the “best practices” I had learned in American schools. Over
those two years in Helsinki, I received many opportunities to study Finland’s
teaching practices up close, observing my colleagues for more than one hundred
classroom hours and completing my teaching practicum, supervised by two
veteran Finnish colleagues, for my American master’s degree in elementary
education.
In writing this book, I was curious to see if other teachers in Finland were
employing similar practices I had witnessed in Helsinki, so I visited several
schools around Finland. Also, I interviewed Finnish teachers at the preschool,
primary, and secondary levels. In doing so, I learned that many of the teaching
practices I saw in Helsinki could be found throughout Finland.
The strategies I found weren’t flashy like 1:1 iPad implementation, nor did
they seem idealistically abstract like, “Just trust the students, ya’ll!” The
teaching methods were simple, effective practices that could benefit any
classroom. And, best of all, I found that many of the strategies, when I
implemented them, brought joy to my classroom. Probably these Finnish
practices would need to be adapted slightly to work in another teaching context,
like America’s, but they certainly weren’t “Finland-only” methods.
Consider, for example, one of the strategies I suggest in this book: taking
little brain breaks throughout the school day. Without educational policy change,
American teachers would find it difficult to implement the frequent Finnish-style
fifteen-minute breaks of free play, but it’s not too difficult to imagine that U.S.
teachers could teach like Finland by offering their students tiny chunks of
“choice time” throughout the day, in an effort to keep kids fresh and focused in
the classroom.
In this book, I’m interested in looking at what American teachers—inspired
by Finland’s education approach—can do today that will make a positive
difference in their classrooms, despite the obvious systemic differences
described by Pasi Sahlberg in the foreword.
When the first PISA results were announced in 2001, Finland was shocked to
find itself ranked number one as an education system. Its softer approach of
short schools days, light homework loads, and little standardized testing bucked
the conventional wisdom of how to get great learning outcomes. This tiny

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the conventional wisdom of how to get great learning outcomes. This tiny
Nordic country was suggesting to America, and the rest of the world, that there
is another way to do school, without narrowing the curriculum and stressing out
teachers and kids. That different methodology is evident at the policy level, but
it’s also observed on the microscale, in Finnish classrooms.
As American teachers, Finnish educators will probably not inspire us with
innovative teaching strategies, because many of Finland’s pedagogical
innovations have been adopted from North America and elsewhere (Sahlberg,
2015). But what we can learn from teachers in Finland, based on what I’ve
experienced, is the way in which they seem to value happiness more than
achievement. They make small, simple decisions to promote joyful teaching and
learning, and in the end, as numerous PISA tests have shown, their students do
well anyway.
Like many American teachers, I read Doug Lemov’s book Teach Like a