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

Coach more
One of the first things I noticed in my Helsinki school’s woodworking classroom
was a little wooden sign that read “Learning by Doing.” Every time I visited, I’d
see this maxim put in practice. Students were happily busy, working on
individual projects they found interesting and challenging. I found that my
colleague, the woodworking teacher, was usually circulating around the
classroom and coaching, meeting with students and offering feedback (Ferlazzo,
in press).
I saw the same thing in the home economics classroom and the textiles
classroom where children often sew and knit. I’m convinced that this group of
former Finnish colleagues has subscribed to the “learning by doing” approach
for years, and that this belief powerfully informs their teaching, in which they
spend a significant portion of classroom instruction working like coaches.
Many adults know from firsthand experience that the best way to master
something is through practice in a “real-world” setting. The problem is that
classroom learning, traditionally speaking, hasn’t looked this way. At school,
children often learn about science through watching videos, reading nonfiction
texts, and completing exercises, rather than designing and implementing their
own experiments like actual scientists. The practice of coaching puts the
ownership of the learning process in the right place, squarely on the shoulders of
the learners.
I don’t think teachers need to be teaching unique subjects, such as
woodworking or home economics, to tap into the genius of the learning-by-
doing philosophy. All that’s needed, I’ve found, is a shift in our thinking and a
subsequent shift to our teaching approach.
In my first year of classroom teaching in the Boston area, I heard a mantra
from a mentor teacher that I’ve never forgotten: the person who does the work
does the learning. When I recall that first year of teaching, I cringe. I used to talk
until the cows come home, usually while sitting on the rug with my first graders.
“I’m learning a lot this year,” I told a veteran coteacher one afternoon (Ferlazzo,
in press).

---

in press).
“Sure,” she said, “but how much are the students learning?” Ouch. I knew
that my students, sitting and listening on the rug most of the day, weren’t
learning much at all.
To reverse this, I knew I needed to give up the “sage on the stage” routine.
So I started experimenting, beginning in American classrooms and then in
Finnish classrooms, with the aim of getting my students to do more of the
learning. Earlier, I mentioned how I once brought a stopwatch to class to help
keep my mini lessons short. In just a few days, I found that those shorter lessons
now felt comfortable, and my students were having significantly more time—
after the mini lesson—to learn through doing (Ferlazzo, in press).
While I felt satisfied with this pedagogical shift, once I moved to Finland it
felt insufficient. My Finnish colleagues, especially those who taught
woodworking, home economics, and textiles, showed me the joys of giving
children even more opportunities to learn through doing.
In Chapter 3 I described how I made a significant change to how I would
teach English language arts in Helsinki by letting my students spend most of the
lessons working more like real writers. They’d look to me as an editor or, to put
it another way, a coach. In the section about the strategy leave margin, I
discussed how this particular practice of restructuring my sixth graders’
language arts lessons helped to develop the autonomy of my students. Now, I’m
investigating how this shift and other similar practices promote mastery.
Giving my Helsinki students more time to work like writers during language
arts was a good start, but it was insufficient on its own. My teacher-friend Jere
Linnanen told me that students often need a “push” to progress; otherwise,
they’ll stay at their current levels. For me, pushing looks like giving good
feedback.
When I mention good feedback, I’m not talking about distributing stickers
and shouting, “Way to go!” I’m referring to feedback that’s specific, honest, and
constructive. Through blogging, crafting articles, and book writing, I’ve
personally seen the importance of good feedback. In my experience, professional
editors limit their praise. They might mention one or two things that they
appreciate about a work, but they spend most of their time naming what needs
improvement. Initially, I felt a little offended. Wasn’t the primary job of a
writing coach to applaud?
Nowadays I embrace this methodology: by limiting praise, editors emphasize
feedback that’s specific, honest, and constructive. These days, I’m no longer
crushed if I hear only a few words of positive feedback from an editor, because I
know my “coach” and I share the same goal: we both want to produce a high-

---

quality work together. I’m convinced that nurturing this kind of attitude in the
classroom would help students to learn better.
The best way to improve, I’ve found, is through addressing weak spots, and
that’s exactly where coaching is needed. The good coach shines a light on the
undeveloped areas of the learning and then offers adequate support to the learner
—through modeling and good feedback, primarily. There is a place for praise in
our classrooms, but I suspect that praise is not something that skillful teachers
will need to work to incorporate in their classrooms. It’s something they provide
quite naturally, in my experience.
If you’re like me and you want to develop as a coach, the structure of your
lessons must accommodate this role. We need a framework that facilitates
learning by doing and plenty of opportunities for good feedback. For me, that
structure is something called the workshop model. While I’ve seen variations of
this approach, it’s composed of three basic parts: a mini lesson introducing the
day’s aim, active independent work, and group reflection on how students have
progressed toward that particular aim. (Paula Havu, my former colleague, once
told me that this was billed as the ideal lesson structure during her teacher-
training program.)
I was an elementary teacher in the Boston area when I first heard about this
model and started to implement it in my classroom. In hindsight, I didn’t always
maximize this approach, because I’d sometimes spend too much time on mini
lessons and reflections. My students would have benefited from having more
time to complete independent work. Giving children adequate time to work
paves the way for good teacher feedback.
To guide student work and teacher feedback, our classrooms need clear,
achievable goals. I’ve found that one of the most effective things we can do as
teachers, which helps us and our students to stay focused on mastery, is to
incorporate learning targets into our teaching on a regular basis. Educators
Connie Moss and Susan Brookhart (2012) define a learning target as follows:
A learning target is not an instructional objective. Learning targets differ
from instructional objectives in both design and purpose. As the name
implies, instructional objectives guide instruction, and we write them
from the teacher’s point of view. Their purpose is to unify outcomes
across a series of related lessons or an entire unit. . . .
Learning targets, as their name implies, guide learning. They
describe, in language that students understand, the lesson-sized chunk of
information, skills, and reasoning processes that students will come to
know deeply. We write learning targets from the students’ point of view
and share them throughout today’s lesson so that students can use them

---

and share them throughout today’s lesson so that students can use them
to guide their own learning. (p. 3)
In my experience, the workshop model works seamlessly with learning targets,
because it puts the emphasis on kids learning by doing, which allows teachers to
work like coaches.
How do you write a learning target? According to Moss and Brookhart
(2012), the process begins with a teacher choosing a standard and boiling it
down to an objective for a lesson or a set of lessons, to make it clear what the
teacher wants the children to achieve in the classroom. The next step involves
reframing the objective to reflect what the children themselves should seek to
achieve in the classroom. Moss and Brookhart recommend that an educator
follow several steps when designing learning targets. The most crucial, in my
opinion, is deciding on a “performance of understanding” (p. 39), informed by
the lesson’s teaching objective. During this step, teachers think about what their
students could do to prove that they’ve achieved the instructional objective for
the lesson or set of lessons.
In their book Learning Targets, Moss and Brookhart offer an example from a
sixth grade teacher who’s teaching a math lesson on variability. The teacher has
identified the following instructional objectives: “Students will explain how the
element of chance leads to variability in a set of data,” and “Students will
represent variability using a graph” (p. 38). With those objectives in hand, the
teacher crafts a learning target for the students: “We will be able to see a pattern