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

Prove the learning
Finnish education is famous for its (relative) lack of standardized tests, but this
reputation has led some to believe that Finland’s teachers abstain from testing
their students. In my experience, this just isn’t the case. At the elementary level,
for example, I’ve found that Finnish educators offer more summative
assessments than what I’d expect to see in American schools. This phenomenon
stems, I believe, from Finland’s traditional system of grading, in which children,
even in some primary grades, are given a number grade for each subject at the
end of each semester. The grading scale ranges from four, the lowest, to ten, the

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highest. This traditional grading system puts pressure on Finnish teachers to
average the scores of tests, in order to come up with justifiable number grades.
That being said, the tide of traditional testing and grading seems to be
changing in this Nordic country. Finland’s newest national core curriculum,
which was implemented in the fall of 2016, deemphasizes number grades for
elementary school children, giving schools the opportunity to give narrative
feedback at the end of a marking period in lieu of number grades. Today, there’s
more of a push for formative assessment in Finnish schools, too.
While I’m opposed to traditional grading systems (I’ve often found that
grades distract students from the joy of learning simply for the sake of learning),
I am a fan of getting students to prove their learning, because it’s something that
develops mastery. At my Helsinki school, I would often notice my Finnish
colleagues making their own summative assessments. They might use aspects of
the end-of-unit tests provided by the school’s commercial curricula, but I rarely
noticed them making straight copies of black-line masters and administering
them to their students (something I was in the habit of doing in America).
Customizing tests was an obvious effort by my Finnish colleagues to align
assessments more closely to the teaching in their classrooms. And this strategy
paved the way for their students to prove their learning more effectively.
That wasn’t the only thing I noticed: typically, I’d see my colleagues
applying a simple principle in their custom-made assessments. My Helsinki
mentor teacher was the first person to open my eyes to this particular aspect of
testing in Finland. She said that she’d often ask her students, when answering
exam questions, to perustella. Initially she wasn’t sure how to translate this
Finnish word into English, but after discussing the concept, we decided that it
means “justify.” On my mentor teacher’s tests, she’d often ask her students to
show what they know by providing evidence of their learning.
Sure enough, when I’d study my colleagues’ customized tests in the
teachers’ workroom or the teachers’ lounge, I kept seeing the same philosophy at
work. This simple practice of getting students to prove their learning, by
justifying their answers on assessments, is something that may partially explain
Finland’s consistently high PISA scores, in which fifteen-year-olds must think
critically and creatively.
The concept of perustella is perhaps most easily seen in Finland’s high
school matriculation tests. Once Finnish students have passed the required
courses for high school, they are allowed to sit for the national Matriculation
Examination, which is arranged by the Matriculation Examination Board and
administered simultaneously throughout all high schools. Before graduating
from high school, students must pass at least four individual tests from this

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national examination. They can choose which tests to complete, with the
exception of one assessment: evaluating a student’s ability in a native language
—Finnish, Swedish, or Sami (Sahlberg, 2015). In Finnish Lessons 2.0 (2015),
Pasi Sahlberg explains what makes Finland’s Matriculation Examination unique
among typical standardized assessments around the world:
The nature of these individual exams is to try to test students’ ability to
cope with unexpected tasks. Whereas the California High School Exit
Examination . . . , for example, is guided by a list of potentially biased,
sensitive, or controversial topics to be avoided, the Finnish examination
does the opposite. Students are regularly asked to show their ability to
deal with issues related to evolution, losing a job, dieting, political issues,
violence, war, ethics in sports, junk food, sex, drugs, and popular music.
Such issues span across subject areas and often require multidisciplinary
knowledge and skills. (Chapter 1, loc. 1083)
Here’s a collection of sample questions for the Matriculation Examination,
provided by Sahlberg:
• Native language: “Media is competing for audiences—what are the
consequences?”
• Philosophy and ethics: “In what sense are happiness, good life and well-
being ethical concepts?”
• Health education: “What is the basis of dietary recommendations in Finland
and what is their aim?” (Strauss & Sahlberg, 2014)
• • •
IN HELSINKI, INSPIRED BY MY FINNISH COLLEAGUES, I started to
design end-of-unit (summative) assessments that centered on getting my students
to prove their learning better through open-ended, challenging questions, which
required them to think creatively and critically. In responses to these kinds of
questions, I’d award my students points for providing pieces of evidence,
showing their knowledge and understanding of a particular content area.
Once I made this shift in how I designed these assessments, I found that I
had a much better grasp on whether or not my students had mastered content in a