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

particular video clip, one teenage student confessed that, initially, he played
computer games throughout each school day, but he eventually grew out of that
phase.
In the conversation afterward, I was surprised to hear that many of my sixth
graders felt that this model was too radical. Specifically, a couple of my students
seemed upset that some Sudbury Valley students were wasting school days on
computer games. Their criticism shocked me a little, because the most outspoken
children in my classroom were the ones who seemed to spend a significant
amount of their free time on digital devices. That day, my sixth grade ethics
class was suggesting to me that they didn’t want to do schooling alone. They
wanted autonomy, of course, but they also didn’t want the Sudbury Valley
model of (nearly) total freedom. This distinction has stuck with me.
That general reaction of my ethics students brought me unexpected relief
because, before this discussion, I thought that, once they had heard about a
model like Sudbury Valley School, they’d express resentment about the more
traditional teacher–student arrangement at my school and so many others.
Instead, my students seemed to want a combination of teacher leadership and
student leadership.
This is where the notion of coplanning—sharing the responsibility of
determining the direction of learning—makes so much sense. It allows teachers
and students to work together to make the most out of school. As Finland seeks
to emphasize the importance of developing student agency in its new curriculum

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to emphasize the importance of developing student agency in its new curriculum
reform, it’s requiring that all Finnish comprehensive schools (grade one to grade
nine) develop and offer one interdisciplinary unit of study, which is of particular
interest to the children, per school year for all students. Additionally, it’s
expected that the children help to plan these interdisciplinary units of study
(Halinen, 2015).
As I was becoming more of a believer in planning with my students, I
decided to cocreate an ethics project with my sixth graders after our study of
democracy. We turned to another concept in our curriculum: sustainable
development. After defining it in basic terms, my students and I started to design
a final unit together. (That felt right, after investigating this idea of a democratic
school.)
We brainstormed different examples of sustainable development, and one of
the topics that seemed to interest my sixth graders was clean energy—
specifically, the use of solar energy. Many of my students heard about a project
at our school, involving older classmates, in which they planned to install solar
panels. Given my sixth graders’ enthusiasm, we decided to investigate this