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

Keep the peace
In eastern Finland I visited Haapaniemi Elementary School, and the principal,
Jussi Kukkola, took me on a brief tour, showing me a couple of classrooms in
action. I found a remarkable sense of calm there—both teachers and students
seemed incredibly relaxed and unhurried, especially as they worked with their
shoes off (a tradition in Finnish homes and schools). The principal told me that,
starting in the fall of 2016, corresponding with the implementation of the latest
national core curriculum, his school would be launching a new set of rules.
Safety was the first one, he noted. But what was the purpose of the new rules?
“To create a peaceful school environment,” Kukkola told me.
This struck me. Here was a Finnish school that already seemed to excel in
this area of offering a calm atmosphere for teachers and students, but this
principal signaled that it should remain a priority. In America, I had heard of
schools aiming to be rigorous, or project based, or high achieving. But peaceful?
That was a new one for me.
In visits to other classrooms in Finland, I had noticed a similar peaceful
atmosphere. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this common characteristic. At
my Helsinki school, we’d often have visitors from abroad, and I’d hear them

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comment on the same thing: the learning seemed so relaxed and so stress-free. I
believe that this typical feature of peacefulness in Finnish schools is a major
reason that Finland’s students learn so efficiently and have performed so well on
international tests like the PISA. “Learning is supported by a peaceful and
friendly working atmosphere,” declares Finland’s newest curriculum framework
(Finnish National Board of Education, 2016, p. 31), “and a calm, peaceful
mood.”
This respect for peace is something that’s also evident in the Finnish
language, in which several words describe occasions in which peace should be
kept, saunarauha (sauna peace), ruokarauha (food peace), and joulurauha
(Christmas peace), for example. This appreciation for tranquility is especially
apparent during Finland’s Independence Day celebration. Unlike the Fourth of
July, in which crowds of people gather to watch booming fireworks, the Finnish
holiday is observed by lighting candles in the quiet of one’s home and
remembering fallen soldiers.
In American classrooms, I’ve detected a healthy push for less teacher talk
and more active learning; “turn-and-talk,” for example, appears to be a popular
strategy, in which students process their thinking out loud with one another. I
wonder, though, if many American students are missing out on important
moments of calm in the classroom because of this pedagogical trend of
activating learning. While working silently may not qualify as active learning, I
think there’s wisdom in the approach of many Finnish classrooms I’ve observed,
where children can have long stretches of time—while completing independent
work—to work quietly.
Recently, I stumbled upon a body of research that seems to suggest the
importance of this practice. Decades ago, University of Oregon researchers
identified a relationship between the noisiness of a child’s place of residence and
a child’s ability to detect the difference between two alike words and reading
proficiency. In their experiment, they found that the louder the home
environment, the more difficult it was for children to identify two similar words
and read proficiently. More recently, University of Wisconsin researchers found
something similar in a classroom setting: when there’s background noise, very
young children struggle to acquire novel words (Khazan, 2016).
In her article “How Noise Pollution Impairs Learning,” Olga Khazan (2016),
an Atlantic staff writer, described this compelling research, involving 106
toddlers:
First, a group of 2-year-olds were taught two nonsense words . . . in the
presence of background noise that was either 5 or 10 dB quieter than the
voice of the teacher. The children successfully learned the words when

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voice of the teacher. The children successfully learned the words when
the background noise was quiet, but not when it was loud.
Khazan noted that the result was identical in the second test, in which the
researchers ran an experiment with toddlers who were a bit older. A third test
revealed that the young children were able to acquire the definitions of novel
words when exposed to loud background sounds, as long as they had first
encountered them when the learning environment wasn’t noisy.
Although further studies are needed to explore the impact of noise on
learning (especially on older children), the research suggests that background
noise in our classrooms can influence student learning. As a teacher, this
encourages me to ensure that my classroom is a place of peace for students.
This section’s strategy, keep the peace, is about promoting the well-being of
everyone in the classroom through offering a calm learning environment, where
students can work with little background noise and a lack of stress. The
following are a few possible solutions for keeping the peace.