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

CHAPTER
4
Mastery
ON DECEMBER 4, 2001, THE FIRST PISA RESULTS were published, and
among the member nations of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and
Development, Finland was the highest performing in all three academic areas:
reading, mathematics, and science (Sahlberg, 2015). In Finnish Lessons 2.0
(2015), Pasi Sahlberg offers this analysis:
This new international study revealed that earlier student performance
gaps with Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong were closed. Finns seemed to
learn all the knowledge and skills they demonstrated on these tests
without private tutoring, after-school classes, or the large amounts of
homework that are particularly prevalent among students in East Asia.
Furthermore, the relative variation of educational performance between
schools in the sample was exceptionally small in Finland. . . . The next
two PISA cycles, in 2003 and 2006, advanced and consolidated Finland’s
reputation even further, thus elevating the world media’s interest in
Finnish education. (Chapter 1, loc. 1215–1228)
Although the academic results of Finland’s fifteen-year-olds dipped in the
2009, 2012, and 2015 PISA cycles, the PISA data broadly reveal that this Nordic
nation, according to Sahlberg, “[produces] consistently high learning results
regardless of their students’ socioeconomic status” (Chapter 1, loc. 1232).
To be happy, one of the basic things that we must have is feeling competent
in a particular area, such as sculpting, coding, or writing. Raj Raghunathan
(2016) says it is our demand for mastery. As teachers, we can infuse our
classrooms with joy by addressing this need for expertise. Through teaching in

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Helsinki and visiting schools throughout Finland, I’ve gathered a handful of
classroom strategies for developing mastery, inspired by Finnish educators:
teach the essentials, leverage the tech, coach more, prove the learning, and
discuss the grades.