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

TEACH LIKE
FINLAND

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CHAPTER
1
Well-being
WE MOVED TO HELSINKI IN LATE JULY, AND BEFORE school began in
mid-August my family and I spent several evenings strolling though our new
city. In every park I remember visiting, I saw an unfamiliar sight: dozens of
locals doing nothing but sitting on blankets, drinking wine, and chatting. They
weren’t in a rush, it seemed, to get anything done. They were simply enjoying
those warm, sunny evenings with their close friends.
Life in Finland seemed much slower than the pace of life I had experienced
in America. And I confess that, after living in high-powered Boston, I was
initially attracted to the relaxed atmosphere in Helsinki—but I remained
skeptical of this approach to life. What were these folks ultimately achieving, I
wondered, by simply lounging around for hours on those blankets?
Despite burning out during my first year of teaching, I was still clinging to
this ideology—years later in Helsinki—that my worth could be quantified by my
productivity. “Tim, you’re not a human doing,” a mentor teacher in Boston used
to remind me. “You’re a human being.” Even in Finland, those were words I still
needed to hear.
I think the slower pace of this tiny Nordic country eventually rubbed off on
me, because during those first weeks of teaching in Helsinki I tried to be more
intentional about working less after school. When I returned home in the late
afternoon, I left my schoolwork in my backpack (something that didn’t feel
natural, initially) so I could focus on playing with my one-year-old and catching
up with my wife.
In Helsinki I was starting to feel more like a human being, but I confess that
it was a different story at school. Initially I wasn’t prepared to adopt a different

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approach to my work as a teacher. And my Finnish colleagues were starting to
notice.
Just as my wife had told me, at my Helsinki school I found frequent fifteen-
minute breaks throughout each day, and typically my colleagues were spending
many of these breaks in the teachers’ lounge. (During breaks, several teachers
took turns supervising the younger students outdoors and the older students
indoors.) But even after three weeks of school, I still hadn’t spent two free
minutes in the lounge taking a break with my colleagues. I’d only quickly enter
that space to fetch my mail every morning, and then I’d make a beeline to my
classroom.
In those brief moments of entering the lounge, I saw something similar to
what I discovered while strolling through parks in downtown Helsinki. Many of
my colleagues were sipping coffee, flipping through newspapers, and chatting
leisurely with one another. And, oftentimes, when I walked by the lounge, I
heard them laughing loudly. I was starting to suspect that my colleagues were
lazy.
In September, over the course of a week, three of my Finnish colleagues told
me that they worried I might burn out, because they hadn’t seen me in the
teachers’ lounge. I admitted to them that I was spending all of those fifteen-
minute breaks in my classroom, working hard on different teaching-related tasks.
These three colleagues suggested that I change my routine.
At first I laughed off their concern. I told them I knew what it was like to
burn out, and I assured them that I was doing just fine. But they remained
steadfast: they were serious about the importance of taking little breathers
throughout the day. One of my colleagues told me that she needed to spend a
few minutes every day in the lounge, slowing down with other teachers. She
claimed it made her a better teacher.
At the time I felt so confused because my impulse to work nonstop—often
sacrificing my well-being in the short term—didn’t seem like something that
many of my Finnish colleagues supported. I had always believed that the best
educators were the ones who worked the hardest, even if it meant surviving on a
few hours of sleep, skipping lunch breaks in exchange for more time for lesson
prep, and never finding any time to socialize with colleagues. Many of the
teachers I had most admired in the United States were brimming with passion for
their profession, just like me, but always seemed to be on the brink of burning
out. But in Helsinki I didn’t see my Finnish colleagues working through lunch
breaks or hiding in their classrooms for the entirety of each day. Almost always,
they looked relatively stress-free compared with what I had seen in American
schools. And, unsurprisingly, their students did, too.

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I’ve heard several critics of the Finnish education model suggest that one
major reason the United States can’t learn from this tiny Nordic country is
cultural differences. But I think this is one area where we can learn from
Finland’s schools. As Americans, our cultural priorities—which seem to say,
ultimately, that chasing success (or “being the best”) is what matters most in life
—greatly diminish our well-being and, consequentially, the well-being of our
nation’s children.
The push for America’s kids to succeed starts, for many of them, as babies.
This is especially evident among wealthy families. Parents purchase flash cards
and educational games, and for toddlers they scout out the best preschools,
institutions that may cost more than $30,000 a year, to give their kids an early
academic edge. Scores of American parents decline to send their children to
kindergarten, a concept researchers call redshirting, so that their kids will be a
year older and more developmentally advanced, which would translate,
hypothetically, into better academic performance. During the middle school
years some parents slap bumper stickers on their cars that read “Proud parent of
an honor roll student.” In high school, many students are advised to pad their
resumes if they want to get into the best colleges, so they stretch themselves thin
by maintaining high GPAs, loading up on extracurricular activities, taking AP
classes, and signing up for private SAT tutoring. This pressure to excel in high
school varies across the country, but in some places, like Palo Alto, California,
suicide rates among high school students are staggeringly high.
Emma Seppälä, a researcher at Stanford University and the author of The