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

Bring in the music
One of the first things I noticed when I visited Minna Räihä’s sixth grade class at
the Kalevala Comprehensive School in Kuopio was a drum set in the back of the
classroom, along with a few other musical instruments. In the morning, I shared
with her students that my four-year-old son loved drumming but I couldn’t play
a lick of it. Minna assured me that one of her students could teach me. Sure
enough, right before heading to lunch with Minna’s class, one of her sixth
graders, a skillful drummer, graciously led me over to the drum set in the
classroom. A small group of children formed a semicircle around us. First, the
boy modeled the proper technique, involving the base drum, the snare drum, and
the high hat. He handed me the drum sticks, and I sat on the stool. Initially I was
overwhelmed, struggling to put those three elements together. But that sixth
grader, and another one of his classmates, didn’t give up on me. Like good
teachers, they kept giving me pointers and exuding optimism, and eventually I

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got the hang of it. The small group of children cheered.
That day Minna showed me a professional-looking CD that she and her
students helped to create. I was impressed. Minna explained that her sixth
graders have a few extra music lessons each week, because her students had
chosen, years earlier, to have a special emphasis on music studies. It was an
arrangement I had seen at a couple of other Finnish public schools.
Although Minna’s class had a special focus on learning music, I had
observed something similar in “regular” classrooms at my Helsinki school. We
had a large music classroom, where most instruments were kept, but I noticed
that my Finnish colleagues would sometimes bring musical instruments into
their classrooms. Occasionally I’d hear the pulse of a base drum coming from
the sixth grade classroom next door.
In recent years, schools across America have cut back on the arts, leaving
some students without any music instruction. This hasn’t been the case in
Finland. In my first year of teaching in Helsinki, I was shocked to find that my
fifth graders had the same number of lessons of math as music: three hours,
every week. I used to think it was a little funny to give so many hours to a
“special” subject, but over time I’ve stumbled across research linking music
training to academic success, and I no longer question this Finnish practice.
For example, in a 2014 study, involving hundreds of children from low-
income homes, researchers found that music lessons can help such kids improve
their literacy and linguistic skills. Nina Kraus, a researcher and a neurobiologist
at Northwestern University, discussed this link at the American Psychological
Association’s 122nd Annual Convention: “Research has shown that there are
differences in the brains of children raised in impoverished environments that
affect their ability to learn. . . . While more affluent students do better in school
than children from lower income backgrounds, we are finding that musical
training can alter the nervous system to create a better learner and help offset this
academic gap” (APA, 2014).
Music lessons, the researchers concluded, seem to strengthen how the
nervous system handles noise in a bustling atmosphere, such as a schoolyard.
Because of this improvement in brain functioning, the children may develop
better memory and a greater ability to focus in the classroom setting, which will
help them to communicate better (APA, 2014).
Although Finland’s classrooms are easily able to reap the benefits of having
more music in their class schedules, there are certain steps that any teacher can
take to infuse their classrooms with more music, even if formal music lessons
are no longer offered at school. The idea of bringing in a drum set or carrying in
a dozen classical guitars (as I experienced in my Helsinki classroom) would be

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fun, but I don’t think efforts to bring in more music need to be this extensive.
Also, it would be difficult for teachers to justify focusing on musical instruction
if the curriculum doesn’t call for it. The best arrangement, I can imagine,
involves integration: mixing music with academic instruction.
For example, with my Helsinki fifth graders, I brought hip-hop into my
classroom when we studied the elements of a story (in English language arts)
and the water cycle (in a science class). On YouTube, I’ve found many fun hip-
hop videos, with lyrics that reinforce the learning in the classroom. Singing those
songs together, while rhyming and keeping the beat, wasn’t just a fun way to
engage the curriculum: Kraus’s research suggests to me that efforts like these
can, in part, help students develop stronger neural connections and better
language skills.
Anne-Marie Oreskovich, a musician, a math scholar, and the founder of
Math Musical Minds, believes that integrating music into math lessons can
improve academic learning. For younger children, she suggests the simple
exercise of playing enjoyable music with a discernible rhythm: the kids keep the
beat (while counting, forward and backward) with simple objects, such as
spoons. This activity can strengthen the children’s ability to recognize patterns,
grasping the structure and sequencing of numbers. For older children,
Oreskovich suggests letting them make strings of numbers and portray them as
chords. “Music decomposes to math,” said Oreskovich, “and math decomposes
to music” (quoted in Schiff, 2016).
During one lesson when I was in high school, one of my English teachers
played a Bruce Springsteen song, on a boom box, as we analyzed its lyrics. It
was such a (relatively) small effort by the teacher, but I remember this particular
lesson because it was unusually fun and engaging; the musical component
breathed life into this assignment.
At the elementary level, I’ve heard of some teachers who use music to get
their students to transition from one activity to another. Additionally, I’ve met
American educators in the public school setting who have used music to teach
their young students essential content, such as the names of the continents. In
one Massachusetts elementary school, where I taught computer lessons for
several months, I remember hearing different variations of the “Continents
Song,” sung by students and their teachers. (It was a delightful experience to
hear these children singing in the computer lab, which happened spontaneously
when I started a Google Maps lesson.) Their elementary school teachers had
taught them the names of the continents set to different melodies from classic
songs, such as “Three Blind Mice.” Later, when I became a classroom teacher,
their creativity inspired me to do the same with my first and second graders, and
I firsthand saw that this was a fun way for my young students to learn something

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I firsthand saw that this was a fun way for my young students to learn something
well.
As teachers, we don’t need to shy away from the strategy bring in the music,
even if we’re not musically inclined. We can experiment with different
arrangements that feel comfortable for us and our students and, ultimately, tap
into the joys and academic benefits of incorporating music in the classroom.