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

Simplify the space
Once, as I was leading a tour of my Helsinki school for American visitors, one
administrator turned to face me, with a slight look of concern. “I noticed there’s
not much on the walls,” he said. That visitor wanted to know why.
The easy answer was that my Helsinki school was out for the summer, and
many students, including my own, had taken their work home. But that wasn’t
the whole story. If you were to visit my school in May of that year, the sight
wouldn’t have been all that different. You would have found, I’d imagine, a set
of posters students completed during a recent geography unit, or drawings that
students created during their visual arts class. In my visits to other Finnish
schools, I saw the same kinds of items being displayed. In my experience,
teachers in Finland prefer to minimize the amount of stuff on the walls in their
classrooms and the hallways. It’s something that may come naturally to them.
The mantra “less is more” is often celebrated by the Finns, evidenced by the
minimalism of Finnish design. Visit a Finnish home, and it’s likely that you’ll
find an uncluttered, cozy space (think Ikea style). A nice compliment you can
pay a Finnish host, I’ve found, is a positive remark about the home’s tunnelma
(atmosphere). In my years of living in Finland, I’ve learned that a cozy home,
from a Finnish perspective, depends largely on keeping one’s living space as

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simple as possible.
I think the same principle informs the design of Finland’s classrooms. Many
visitors who see Finnish schools in action notice the calmness of students and
teachers. Surely there are many factors behind this phenomenon, but one reason
for the lack of overwhelm, I believe, is the simplified learning space.
In 2014, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University explored this idea,
investigating how a highly decorated classroom might sidetrack children from
focusing on learning. In the study, kindergarten students were taught six
introductory science lessons in a laboratory classroom, where researchers would
experimentally change the learning environment—for some lessons, the walls
were crowded with decorations, and at other times, the walls were completely
bare. The study revealed that children “were more distracted by the visual
environment, spent more time off task, and demonstrated smaller learning gains
when the walls were highly decorated than when the decorations were removed”
(Fisher, Godwin, & Seltman, 2014, p. 1362).
As teachers, reducing the external stimuli in our classrooms is especially
important for young students, because the ability to focus is something that
develops as children age. The authors of this study pointed out that sixth graders
are able to ignore irrelevant stimuli much more easily than preschoolers
(Hoffman, 2014).
Anna V. Fisher, the study’s lead author, told The New York Times in an
interview that academic results are affected by numerous factors, but many of
them are beyond the control of educators. That being said, the appearance of a
classroom is something that teachers can easily influence, the researcher noted
(Hoffman, 2014).
Displaying high-quality student work can be a joyful endeavor. Students can
(and should) feel proud of the good work they’ve done, and as educators we can
be proud of the ways that we’ve shepherded them. At the same time, research
suggests that there might be such a thing as overdoing it.
As teachers, I think we can sometimes become too focused on how learning
appears. We can spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing about and
affixing student work to our walls, when there are more essential aspects of
teaching to attend to. With embarrassment, I remember I used to staple my first
graders’ math worksheets to the bulletin board, during my early years of
teaching in the Boston area. A balance is needed, and yet I recognize that it may
feel like a struggle to simplify your classroom.
Years ago, I met teachers from a public school in Massachusetts who told me
that their school received scathing criticism for failing to display an adequate
amount of student work, even though it was still early in the school year. The

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evaluators felt that the (mostly) bare walls suggested that there was a lack of
student learning. So what do you think those teachers prioritized from that day
forward?
This idea that paper on walls connotes good learning seems silly, in my
opinion, because it’s possible that a teacher could be spending a significant
amount of classroom time directing students to complete wall decorations. That
teacher’s classroom may look impressive, but scratch beneath the surface and I
suspect you will find a lack of meaningful learning taking place during the
school day.
So how can teachers keep learning spaces simple, despite greater pressure,
perhaps, to bombard classroom walls with evidence of learning? It starts with
thinking through the purpose of displaying student work. Is it primarily for
vanity’s sake, the appearance of learning? If it is, I’m convinced, from my own
experience in American classrooms, that it will ultimately burden us teachers,
distracting us from our most essential work.
I’m not suggesting that teachers keep their classrooms completely bare. If
we’re purposeful about the stuff that goes up on the walls, there’s joy there. But
we probably need to exercise restraint because of external pressure. That urge to
festoon the walls with paper might come from the perceived threat of tough
evaluators, such as the ones I heard about in Massachusetts, but the pressure will
most likely come from colleagues down the hall, who are affixing lots of paper
to their walls, or parents, who seem to think that more stuff on display equates to
better learning.
But we know, deep down, that showing off a lot of student work and posters
doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a lot of meaningful learning happening in
our classrooms. One of the most important aspects of learning is thinking, and
that is a messy, invisible process. In other words, not everything we do with our
students can be packaged as evidence, ready for display.
One kindergarten teacher in California, Ingrid Boydston, confessed that she
used to completely cover the walls of her classroom, but these days, according to