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

CHAPTER
3
Autonomy
IN MY FIRST YEAR OF TEACHING IN FINLAND, THE day before the first
day of school, there was a faculty meeting in the teachers’ lounge, and my
principal asked—before dismissing everyone—if there were any questions. I still
had many, but a specific one continued to burn in my mind: where would I
escort my fifth graders when the school day would end?
In America, at every elementary school I had ever visited, at the end of each
school day teachers would lead their students to the exits, where the children
would either ride the bus or get picked up by an adult (or, in very rare cases,
walk home). I assumed there was a similar protocol in Helsinki. But when I
posed this question to the faculty, my colleagues looked baffled.
In hindsight, their confusion made perfect sense. That’s because my fellow
Helsinki teachers weren’t typically escorting their students to the exits. Their
kids would simply leave the classroom, exiting the school on their own—even
the first graders.
So the next day I did what my Finnish colleagues were in the habit of doing.
When my last lesson concluded, I dismissed my fifth graders without leading
them to the exits and, out of curiosity, I watched them fetch their backpacks
from the coat rack in the hallway. Several of my students took out their own cell
phones and called their parents, which was a totally unfamiliar sight for me. Not
only that, but I overheard some of them telling their parents they were heading
home—on their own.
Later, I casually surveyed my fifth graders on this subject, and I saw three-
fourths of my class raise their hands to say they were commuting on their own.
I’d eventually learn that some took the subway, a few took the tram, and others
walked and biked.

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walked and biked.
That same school year, I met a second grade girl who told me that she’d walk
home alone. (It was about one kilometer away, through the center of Finland’s
capital city.) She told me that often no one else was home when she arrived at
her family’s apartment, but instead of twiddling her thumbs, she’d complete her
homework (if she had any) and fix herself a snack. Fried eggs were her favorite.
When I told a couple of my fifth graders about this little girl, their attitude was
like, “No big deal, man.” One of my students claimed he had been commuting
home alone since preschool—and I remember thinking, What planet am I on?
Generally, Finnish children seem much more autonomous than American
kids, but they don’t possess an independence gene, of course. What they have,
I’ve observed, are many opportunities, at home and at school, to do things by
themselves without handholding, and through those opportunities, they seem
more self-directed as learners.
As a teacher in the United States, I had always tried to develop autonomy in
my students, especially in the beginning of the school year, but in Finland, where
I found that many of my fifth graders were already fiercely independent, I was
challenged to rethink my teaching practices. Academic literature suggests that a
sense of autonomy is a major ingredient of happiness (Pinsker, 2016), and during
those two years of teaching in Helsinki I saw that, too—my students seemed to
thrive whenever I would make decisions to develop their agency.
In an interview with a group of Finnish kindergarten educators at Niirala
Preschool in Kuopio, I asked them about the best ways to promote joy in the
classroom, and the second element they suggested—after good teacher–student
relationships (a sense of belonging)—was opportunities for children to impact
the classroom. They, too, had identified a link between joy and autonomy. In
Finland’s latest curriculum reform, developing student agency, inside and
outside of school, is one of the major emphases, along with prioritizing the joy
of learning and cultivating a collaborative learning environment (Halinen, 2015).
As a teacher, promoting the autonomy of students is something that I view as
incredibly important, but I admit, humbly, that it’s an area of my craft I still need
to prioritize and cultivate. That being said, through working with
superindependent children in Finland, I’ve identified several teaching strategies
that develop student agency.