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

demand responsibility, goes one step further. It’s more like a guiding principle
that teachers can seek to apply every day in their classrooms, not just at the
beginning of a lesson or a unit.
Taru Pohtola, a foreign language teacher in the Finnish city of Vantaa and a
2015–2016 Fulbright scholar who was based in Indiana for the fall semester, told
me that she believes that giving students more responsibility in the classroom
will also reduce the stress that American teachers experience:
I can’t generalize, but I noticed that it was quite common in many
American schools (at least a lot more common than in Finland) for
teachers, for example, to collect their students’ homework every single
day and spend hours grading these assignments, every single day. The
teachers might feel the need to do so because of the pressure of
standardized tests, and so on, but it might be quite stressful for students,
too, if everything is constantly evaluated. I wondered whether it might
also reduce the actual joy of learning. In Finland, even though we do give
homework and the students do various things in class and at home, we
hardly ever grade their homework (only some specific assignments).

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What we do is go over the work and exercises with the students in class
together. Everything is considered part of the learning process. Giving
the students more responsibility is naturally one way to reduce the
workload of teachers, but taking responsibility is also an important skill
the students need in life, and I believe it’s important to let them practice
it.
As teachers, we can provide our students with responsibilities in the area of
assessment, too. Taru told me she has learned to let her students evaluate
themselves more and sometimes allows them to grade their own papers.
According to her, it has reduced her workload and stress:
For example, instead of me correcting small vocabulary tests and grading
them myself, I can just show the students the correct answers right away
and let them check how well they did. This way I might be able to focus
on something more important perhaps than testing, and I believe the
students also eventually learn more this way since they get immediate
feedback. Even a “test” can be considered a learning event. I can still
collect these “tests” at the end to see who needs more help and practice,
for example. I get the same information as I would have gotten if I had
corrected everything myself, but I have saved a lot of time.
There are many ways we can encourage responsibility taking in our
classrooms, but no matter what we decide to do, it starts with trust. Will we
allow our students, on a regular basis, enough freedom to take meaningful
responsibility of their learning? There’s risk involved in providing reasonable
freedoms to the children in our classroom (they might fail!), but the potential
benefits are outstanding: less stress, a lighter workload for teachers, and, best of
all, more student ownership of learning, which facilitates their academic success
and their joy.
When I started teaching in Finland, I panicked a little when I noticed that
there weren’t enough binders, or folders, for all of my fifth graders. Along with
other classroom teachers at my Helsinki school, I had been provided with new
notebooks: lined, gridded, and blank ones. How, I wondered, were my students
going to keep track of all the loose-leaf sheets of paper without binders or
folders? In the United States, I don’t think I ever saw a student survive on just
notebooks.
Thankfully, I found enough (cardboard) magazine holders for my Helsinki
fifth graders to use, and I distributed them to my students for organizational

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purposes. They kept them on their desks, and my students would usually throw
their loose-leaf sheets into them. Over time, I detected a major problem: my
system of organization and the handouts I gave them weren’t exactly helping
them to stay organized. Often I’d provide them with graphic organizers, and then
I’d see these sheets pile up in their cardboard containers. Eventually their
magazine holders started to overflow, and after school I’d sometimes find their
handouts or books scattered around the classroom—then I’d deliver their
misplaced work into their storage spaces. Also, I noticed that, although I had
given them notebooks, I wasn’t giving them enough opportunities to take notes,
so I’d find a lack of organization inside of their notebooks.
After that first year ended, I threw away all of those cardboard magazine
holders (most of them were in pretty bad shape already), and I decided that I’d
try something different the following year. I’d do what I saw many of my
Helsinki colleagues doing with their students: provide my students with only
notebooks. The children would take responsibility for keeping track of their
things.
This was a simple shift, but that next year I saw my students improve in the
area of organization. Rarely did I find their work lying around the classroom
after school. That year I decided it would be better for me to go easy on the
graphic organizers, so that my students could take care of this responsibility of
jotting down information, and I saw their note-taking skills improve, too.
Through this experience, I learned that limiting “crutches,” such as magazine
holders and graphic organizers, ultimately helped my students develop their own
methods for staying organized. It had become clearer to me: I had an important
role as a teacher to cultivate a classroom where students had enough freedom to
take responsibility over their own learning.

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