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

Celebrate their learning
During my two years of teaching at a Finnish public school, I found myself very
interested in the subjects I’d never seen taught in American public schools,
specifically home economics (“cooking class”), textiles, and woodworking. And
on several occasions, during my free time I’d sneak into my colleagues’
classrooms to get an inside look.
Once, I visited the home economics classroom—a large room with several
kitchenettes and dining tables in front of the teacher’s desk—and found that not
only were the ninth grade students learning how to cook, but also they were
given time to enjoy their work, time to celebrate their learning.
The classroom celebration looked simple, but I thought it was the most
appropriate way to honor the students’ efforts in home economics. The teacher
reserved the last fifteen to twenty minutes of the lesson for these ninth graders to
enjoy the food they made. After this initial visit, I returned several more times to
the home economics classroom, and I continued to see the same thing. There
always seemed to be time for students to savor their edible creations.
This simple practice, I argue, promoted their achievement and their
autonomy in the classroom, but it also benefited their sense of belonging—the
teacher and the students pursued a challenging goal together, and then they
celebrated their finished work together.
Before sitting down to dine at the tables, they needed to complete several
tasks in a limited amount of time: food preparation, cleaning the kitchenettes,

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filling the dishwasher, doing the laundry, and setting the tables with dishes, cups,
and flatware. Remembering myself as a teenage boy, I had a hard time
imagining that I would have ever taken a cooking class seriously, but when I
looked around the classroom, on every occasion I saw girls and boys working
carefully to prepare tasty dishes and manage all of the other required tasks.
In that classroom, it seemed clear to me that these hardworking students
were developing into competent cooks because they were intrinsically
motivated. I didn’t see them pushing themselves to cook well because they
wanted to please their teacher or pad their GPAs. They cooked well, I deduced,
because the process was enjoyable (three ingredients of happiness, by the way,
were on full display: belonging, autonomy, and mastery), and they had adequate
time to enjoy their food at the end of class. Without those final fifteen to twenty
minutes of celebrating, I doubt that they would have worked with the same level
of concentration and enjoyment.
In my work as a writer I’ve experienced a similar phenomenon. The moment
I see my writing published, the hours I poured into the process feel worthwhile
and I derive great satisfaction from having a little time to stop and celebrate the
achievement. I can’t imagine if I was forced to keep producing words without
stopping to feel grateful for my labor. In my work as a teacher, on the other
hand, I admit that it has been harder for me to experience those moments of
healthy pride. But I wonder if that’s because, historically speaking, I’ve rarely
made it a point to celebrate my students’ learning.
The first step requires that we stop seeing a celebration of learning as an
unneeded add-on and start seeing it as something that brings meaning to the
students’ work, motivates them to learn more effectively, and promotes a
learning community. A celebration might take fifteen or twenty minutes of an
occasional lesson, as it does in a Finnish home economics classroom, but
imagine the benefits of this (relatively) small investment.
One thing I tried with my Helsinki students was “book talks.” The practice
was simple: I’d work with my students to choose appropriately leveled books,
they’d prepare little reports showing their understanding of the texts, and then
they’d give five-minute presentations (book talks) in front of their classmates.
Initially I didn’t conceive of book talks as a celebration of learning, but after
two rounds of them during my students’ sixth grade year, it appeared to achieve
this result. I received feedback from several students telling me how much they
enjoyed the opportunity to speak to their classmates about their books and hear
their classmates talk about their books. Also, I heard several of my sixth graders
say out loud, during presentations, how badly they wanted to get their hands on