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

everyone.
I was very pleased with our class dream, but it was not something I, the
teacher, could have accomplished on my own. Everyone connected with our
class played a role: other teachers, students, and their parents. I highly
recommend finding another teacher who can offer advice and join your project.
Perhaps you can be that supportive teacher for a colleague, too.
For our Camp School, I was incredibly grateful to have a veteran colleague
join our class for those three days, and before coming, she insisted on serving
our class in ways I didn’t expect: she called to confirm our reservation,
purchased groceries for our cookouts, and arranged a meeting with me to go over
an important Camp School checklist. (During the trip she even made pancake
batter with a couple of my sixth grade boys!) My colleague gave our class a big
gift, and that service not only made our trip operate smoothly, with much less
stress on my part, but also brought me a lot of joy, knowing that another teacher
was equally invested. While sharing Camp School with another teacher, I think it
was easier for me to focus on enjoying the experience rather than managing the
experience.
Class dreams can be as big as teachers and students make them, but the most
important thing to remember is that they should be shared and realistic.

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Banish the bullying
As the leaders of our classrooms, there’s a lot we can do to discourage bullying
—or, in other words, stop it before it starts. The strategies I’ve mentioned so far
in this chapter—know each child, play with your students, celebrate their
learning, and pursue a class dream—support this goal. By strengthening the
sense of belonging in our classroom, they serve as preventive measures. But
sometimes, despite our best efforts to promote positive interactions in our
classroom, behavior that looks and sounds like bullying can happen. And when it
does, we need an approach for addressing it immediately.
From 18 percent to 31 percent of America’s kids and adolescents experience
school-based bullying, according to a report from the U.S. National Academies
of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. While definitions of bullying vary,
notes reporter Roxanne Khamsi (2016), “the most common way to define the
behavior seems to be as repeated intentional and aggressive actions in which the
perpetrator has greater power—regardless of whether that power imbalance is
real or simply perceived.”
While living in the United States, I taught in three American schools (two
public and one private), and in each one I found sensible ways for stopping
bullying before it starts. I remember seeing morning circles, regular whole-
school gatherings, an antibullying workshop, and a huge poster that was signed
by students as a pledge to stand up to bullying. Those seemed like good
preventive measures, but the one thing I didn’t see was a school-wide system for
addressing bullying-like behavior.
For more than a decade, Finland has been seeking to address the problem of
bullying in its schools. And at my Helsinki school, I was introduced to the
nation’s most popular antibullying program, called KiVa, which is now
implemented in 90 percent of Finland’s schools. KiVa is an abbreviation of the
Finnish words kiusaamista vastaan, meaning “against bullying.” It’s also
wordplay, because the word kiva translates as “nice” (Khamsi, 2016).
This nationwide antibullying program appears promising. In a study of seven
thousand students in Finnish schools, researchers found that KiVa significantly
improved the mental health of children suffering from the highest frequency of
bullying (Ring, 2016).
There are preventive components of KiVa’s strategy: students receive
instruction about bullying (with the help of computer software, for example),
and they role-play in the classroom (Ring, 2016). As I taught in Helsinki, I saw
another valuable aspect of the program: a clear set of steps to follow when
bullying appears to happen. (To recall KiVa’s protocol, I spoke with my former
Helsinki colleague, Paula Havu, who attended training sessions for this

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Helsinki colleague, Paula Havu, who attended training sessions for this
antibullying program.)
Let’s say there’s a conflict between several students. One child accuses a few
classmates of something that appears bullyish, like regularly being left out of
games on the playground. Those students can request a KiVa meeting by
speaking with a teacher. (This process can also be initiated by bystanders, such
as teachers and classmates who observed the bullying-like behavior.) Then the
teacher, with those students, completes a form, briefly describing the incident,
and agrees upon a negotiation date and place. Then the teacher puts this
completed form in a special folder, monitored regularly by a team of KiVa
teachers, who then communicate with a team of older students, who have been
trained to address these conflicts. This way these older students can attend and
facilitate these negotiations.
At this conflict resolution session, typically in an unused classroom during a
break, the teacher, the two parties, and the older students meet together. During
this KiVa conflict resolution session, both parties tell their respective sides of the
story. The initial focus is on listening to one another. Next, the facilitators ask
each party to reflect on their behavior, thinking about how they could have acted
differently. The idea is that these students will identify possible solutions for
preventing this situation. Once each side promises to implement a preventive
strategy, which is written down by the KiVa facilitators, the meeting is finished.
“In KiVa, you don’t need to say sorry unless you want to,” said Paula Havu.
“Because, usually, when you are told to say sorry you don’t necessarily mean it.
. . . In KiVa, you try to focus on where the problem is and how you behaved and
how you could have behaved differently.” Usually, a follow-up meeting is
scheduled with these two parties, two weeks into the future, when the conflict is
revisited. If the problem persists, additional protocol is followed and parents are
notified.
Bullying in Finnish schools isn’t tolerated, but the idea behind the KiVa
program is that there are lots of (relatively) small actions, such as holding
conflict resolution talks or role-playing situations in the classroom, that can be
taken to prevent bullying from happening. “It’s a really good program,” my
colleague Paula assured me.
While I taught in American schools, I think my students and I would have
benefited from implementing several key elements of the KiVa program. In
hindsight, bullying-type behavior would sometimes flare up in my classroom,
but I wasn’t sure how to address it. Having ongoing discussions with my
students about bullying and how to stand up against it would have been useful.
Also, I think it would have been important for me to establish a system for
addressing the complaints of my students. Usually, I’d address conflicts only

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addressing the complaints of my students. Usually, I’d address conflicts only
when I saw them spilling over. Perhaps I could have left a mailbox in the
classroom, like the KiVa folder in Finnish schools, for my students to inform me
about difficult interactions with one another.
Lastly, I think I could have emphasized solutions, more than “sorrys,”
whenever conflicts would spring up in my American classroom. Typically, I’d
nudge my young students to apologize before putting the situation behind us, but
I rarely dwelled on the positive actions my students could have taken. Writing
down their forward-thinking solutions and scheduling a follow-up meeting with
them would have been wise, too.
Bullying in our schools is an obvious joy destroyer, but so too are the small
steps that students take toward that sad outcome. Thankfully, the KiVa program
suggests different ways that we can protect the joy in our classroom by helping
students take ownership for standing up to bullying.