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

the textbook.
Mine the textbook
While teaching in the United States, I was a little suspicious of commercial
curricula. Subtly, these materials were marketed as “teacher-proof,” an idea that
any literate person could follow the scripted lessons found in the teaching
guides. Among my fellow American teachers I detected resentment, because
sticking to the curriculum (“following the script”) limited their creativity and
ultimately diminished their sense of professionalism. I remember meeting one
new teacher in an American public school who seemed horrified by the pressure
to keep pace with her math curriculum, one scripted lesson per day; she knew
that many of her kids weren’t learning the math content, but she felt pressure to
plow ahead anyway.
Some American educators I’ve known mistrust the commercial curricula
because they question the motives of the publishing companies. They wonder,
are these learning materials designed with children’s best interests in mind? I’ve
heard the argument that commercial curricula can sometimes serve as a tool to
prepare students for standardized tests, which are designed by the same
publishing company.
But in Finland, I discovered, my Finnish colleagues appeared to possess a
much more positive view of commercial curricula. It surprised me—instead of
dreading the stuff, they appeared to embrace the materials. In the fall of my first
year in Helsinki, one of my Finnish colleagues, then a first-year teacher, praised
the commercial curricula she used. As we chatted in her classroom, she held up
different teaching guides, assuring me that these materials were designed by
actual classroom practitioners. In other words, this teacher trusted the curricula.
Her view of the textbooks was pragmatic. She reasoned, if these resources are
solid, why would I not use them in my classroom?
I understood my colleague’s point, but I couldn’t help but notice how this
teacher’s embrace of the commercial curricula contrasted sharply with what I
would often observe in American schools. My Helsinki colleagues signaled that
they viewed the use of these materials as valuable in their classrooms, not as a
joy-diminishing obligation. According to teachers I spoke with, the curricula
helped them teach well; specifically, the resources helped them to stay focused

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helped them teach well; specifically, the resources helped them to stay focused
on essential content, keep pace, and lighten the planning load, so they wouldn’t
have to prepare units and lessons from scratch.
In Finland my attitude toward commercial curricula changed significantly. I
started to see these materials as very useful resources. I wasn’t going to let “the
textbook” be the master of my classroom and follow it to a tee, but I was going
to do something I hadn’t done much of in America: mine the textbook.
In his book The Well-Balanced Teacher (2010), Mike Anderson, a veteran
educator and teaching consultant, describes a similar shift in his approach to
textbooks:
After a few years, I started to move away from using the math curriculum
as my sole teaching tool and began to think of it more as a resource. I
followed the general scope and sequence of the math book, using the
activities that fit my students particularly well. Some games in the
program were especially fun and useful. I then created my own lessons
that fit the goals and guidelines of the curriculum that were more
engaging—more hands-on with more differentiation and choice for
students—and skipped lessons that were particularly bland or
developmentally a bad fit for my students. We created a geometric quilt
using the framework of the chapter on geometry that we proudly hung in
our classroom. We did scavenger hunts around the classroom and the
school for real-world uses of fractions and decimals. We played games to
practice place value. Not only did the students enjoy math more, but so
did I! The daily lessons were more fun for me because I knew that they
matched my students’ needs and that students would enjoy them. The
planning itself was fun as I became deeply engaged in the creative
process of crafting lessons and activities based on what was best for my
students. Instead of feeling like the robotic conduit of the scripted math
curriculum, I felt like a teacher again. (pp. 85–86)
Over those two years in Helsinki, I found that the approach of many of my
Finnish colleagues was wise: solid commercial learning materials, when used
strategically, help kids master content. Ideally, the curricular resources that are
given to you as a teacher are high-quality. But even when they’re not, I’ve found
that they’re still usable.
“Keep the good stuff,” says Anderson, “and make it the focus” (p. 86). In
Helsinki, my principal and I taught sixth grade history together, and we’d often
flip through the students’ textbook, using only the content relevant for our class.
The kids needed an anchor text, and the textbook, although flawed, served this

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The kids needed an anchor text, and the textbook, although flawed, served this
purpose. My principal and I weren’t plodding through the history textbook—we
were mining it.
As I taught math in Helsinki, I often followed the commercial curriculum (I
thought it was well sequenced), but I encouraged my students to take a critical
perspective as they completed practice problems. Their math textbooks were
translated from Finnish into English, and on many occasions they identified
subtle errors made by the publishing company. In their ongoing attempt to
outsmart these materials, they worked hard to understand the math.
In recent history, the country of Estonia has performed well on the PISA,
especially in math. So when a group of Estonian educators visited my Helsinki
school, I was eager to talk to them about their nation’s success on these
international tests. Over lunch I chatted with one Estonian teacher, and when I
mentioned that I had observed a culture of textbook usage in Finland’s
classrooms, she told me that she had seen the same thing in Estonia. It was
something she thought that helped explain her country’s success on the PISA. I
wondered, too, if Finland’s consistently high performance on international tests
could be partly attributed to teachers using commercial curricula skillfully in
their classrooms.
As teachers, if we want to promote mastery, we don’t need to, as one 2015
teaching book is assuredly titled, Ditch That Textbook. We can mine the
textbook and use those learning materials in a way that supports good teaching
and learning.