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

Breathe fresh air
When I visited Minna Räihä and her sixth grade classroom in Kuopio, Finland, I
noticed something I probably would have missed if I didn’t have those two years
of teaching in Helsinki. As we chatted during a break, this veteran teacher
interrupted me, midsentence: “I need to open a window.” She rushed over to one
of the classroom windows to let in more fresh air. I chuckled, because it was a
familiar sight.
My Helsinki students were often opening the windows in our classroom,
without asking permission. Sometimes, I’d hear something like “I need some
fresh air” and I’d know that one of my students was making a move to the
windows. In hindsight, I see why several of my pupils were often concerned
with the air quality. Our classroom, formerly a dentist’s office, was tiny and
barely fit the twenty-five of us. The learning space was stuffy unless the
windows were open.
My Helsinki students seemed much more aware of air quality than I had ever
been. In my several years of teaching in the United States, I had never thought to
open the windows in the classrooms where I taught to let in fresh air. It was such
a little, simple thing, but my students (and other teachers in Finland, like Minna)
were helping me to see its importance.
Although research suggests that brain breaks are useful indoors or outdoors
(Walker, 2014), the Finnish students and teachers that I’ve chatted with typically
commend the value of going outside to get fresh air. This philosophy is perhaps
most visible in the policies of many Finnish schools, where elementary school
students are required to head outdoors unless it’s colder than –15°C (5°F). That
means a rainy day isn’t an excuse for staying indoors for a break. During my
first year of teaching in Helsinki, I remember looking out the window on one
autumn day and feeling a bit shocked as I watched scores of children running
around the playground in the rain. As my Finnish father-in-law often likes to
say, “We’re not sugar.”
At Kalevala Comprehensive School, where Minna works, teachers and
students partly condition the air the “natural” way by opening classroom
windows. “In Finland, there [are] very clear regulations about how many pupils
you can take in a certain space,” Minna told me. “It’s been calculated by the
officials that if you have so and so many square meters [and] so much height in
the classroom, then you can only take so and so many pupils.”
But Finland’s appreciation for fresh air wasn’t just a school thing. For
example, I saw Helsinki parents leaving their sleeping infants in strollers on their
balconies, even in freezing temperatures. When I asked Finns about this, they’d
often remark that babies nap better outside. (We did the same with our youngest

---

often remark that babies nap better outside. (We did the same with our youngest
child in Helsinki, and it was something I’d never imagine doing in America.)
In Finland, all the talk about fresh air got me questioning if I had been
missing out for years on a simple strategy for better well-being and better
learning in the classroom. During my visit to the Kalevala Comprehensive
School, I asked Minna about the benefits of fresh air, and she provided me with
a brief science lesson as we chatted by her desk: “When we inhale, we [exhale]
carbon dioxide. And if the level of carbon dioxide becomes too high in the
classroom, it really stops learning—because your [brain doesn’t] work!”
Minna’s finding seems to agree, partly, with a research finding involving
office workers. In this study, two dozen professionals worked for fourteen days
in two rooms, where air quality could be manipulated remotely to resemble the
environment of a standard office building, a “green building,” or a green
building with enhanced ventilation (“green+”). Every afternoon those