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

Anxieties
Realities
Parent sent an e-mail criticizing our
new biology unit.
Our new unit clearly aligns with the
biology curriculum. Tomorrow, I can
send that parent a brief message
communicating this point.
Student accused me of overlooking
bullying.
Bullying is a serious issue, but I’ve yet
to observe it in our classroom. In the
morning, I’ll speak with this student,
just to listen, and then I’ll decide what
to do next.
Journaling in this way is a useful intervention when you feel discouraged as a
teacher, but a helpful ongoing practice involves exercising gratitude. I’ve found
that the simple act of giving thanks, publicly and privately, is something that
sustains me, in the good and the bad times of teaching. Sonja Lyubomirsky of
the University of California, Riverside refers to “gratitude” as a “metastrategy”
because, in the words of Raj Raghunathan (2016, p. 77), “it helps boost
happiness in many different ways.” A handful of studies, for example, reveal
that giving thanks fortifies relationships (Raghunathan, 2016).
The exercise of giving thanks is a practice that diminishes the harmful desire
to pursue superiority—that’s because, according to Raghunathan, it “hinges on
the idea that no one achieves anything just by themselves” (2016, p. 77).

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Collaborate over coffee
For this book, I interviewed several Finnish teachers—at different levels, in
different schools—to hear more about their classroom experiences and gain their
professional insights. There were two questions I’d ask in each of these
interviews: “What brings you joy as a teacher, and what brings your students
joy?”
One of the most popular answers I heard from Finnish teachers, regarding
what brings them joy, is collaboration. This result doesn’t exactly surprise me.
Here’s a short excerpt from my essay in the book Flip the System: Changing
Education from the Ground Up (Elmers & Kneyber, 2016):
In Finland, I found a school structure that fostered rich collaboration
among teachers. In nearly 50 percent of my lessons, I was paired with
one or two of my colleagues. Teachers in my school were not just
collaborating in the traditional sense, by planning and teaching lessons
together—they were truly laboring together, sharing the burdens of
teaching with each other. They were helping each other track down the
resources they’d need for an upcoming lesson. They were discussing
better ways to support needy students. They were analyzing the
curriculum together. They were talking about how to improve recess for
the kids. They were grading tests together. They were offering tech
support to each other. To my surprise, this work often happened in
between sips of coffee, during those fifteen-minute breaks throughout the
day. (pp. 176–177)
Researchers Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley (2012) also noticed this
collaborative atmosphere in Finnish schools:
Teachers in Finland cooperate as a matter of habit, not just to complete
assigned tasks. . . . Cooperation is not just an add-on when the workday
is over. It’s not about temporary teamwork or interpreting student
achievement data together after busy days at school. Cooperation is about
how they create curriculum and how the work itself gets done. A
ministry official explained: “If you give resources to them, they find a
way to solve the problem.” Vision and goals in Finnish schools are often
implicit and shared through daily acts of cooperation, rather than just set
out in a printed strategic plan. (p. 51)

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Over the years, I’ve gotten the sense that teachers in the United States want
to work together, like so many Finnish teachers are in the habit of doing. They
understand the rationale for more cooperation, but they feel like their busy
schedules are holding them back.
As teachers who want to experience the joys and benefits of collaboration, I
think it’s wise for us to focus on something we have more control over: adopting
a different mind-set. Finnish educators benefit from a lighter schedule (with
frequent fifteen-minute breaks and shorts days), but I’ve concluded that the
reason they collaborate so frequently is that they don’t view collaboration as a
luxury. Instead, they see it as a necessity.
As I described earlier, I had the privilege of coteaching about half of my
lessons during my first year of teaching in Helsinki—but, surprisingly, I spent
most of that year doing little coplanning. Resource teachers would come by my
classroom, lend a hand, and then leave. I didn’t possess a mind-set in which I
welcomed cooperation during my free time—I saw this kind of joint work as
slightly inconvenient, and if I’m honest, I thought I was just fine on my own.
But it was during that second year when I relied on my colleagues more
often. One of the major reasons for this stemmed from a crisis I experienced in
the fall, in which I felt very discouraged as a teacher. Throughout that second
year, several of my colleagues lifted up me up though collaboration, and in my
opinion, it ended up being a terrific year. I largely credit them for this triumph.
The shift in my mind-set happened when I believed I was a better teacher
when I relied more on my colleagues. With this strategy, collaborate over coffee,
I’m recommending that teachers start looking for casual, “natural” ways of
working with fellow teachers. While many teachers have benefited from
working with other teachers online (myself included) through Twitter and other
social media platforms, I think we need to get back to doing more of the old-
fashioned form of collaboration: face-to-face interactions with our colleagues.
Indeed, these are the people that we see every day, and just as we thrive when
our coworkers support us, those same coworkers thrive when we support them—
it’s a two-way street.
I used to think collaboration had to be something serious and structured. I
had this mental image of teachers putting their heads together, looking
exhausted, as they pored over unit plans. Generally speaking, I rarely
experienced this kind of collaboration at my Finnish school. Typically,
collaboration seemed to happen organically—and often in the teachers’ lounge.
Nowadays, I define collaboration, in the school context, as anything that two
or more people do together to enhance the quality of teaching and learning. So
that means that a two-minute conversation about how to respond respectfully to
a parent’s e-mail would count as collaboration. So, too, would a five-minute chat

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a parent’s e-mail would count as collaboration. So, too, would a five-minute chat
about how to accommodate the learning needs of a struggling student.
More than anything, I think collaboration is all about mind-set. If you truly
believe that you are a better teacher when you’re working in concert with others,
then I think you will quite naturally find small, simple ways of collaborating. I
don’t think my colleagues in Helsinki had to work hard to collaborate. Their
work together seemed like a by-product of their teaching mind-set.
To collaborate better, cultivating that “us” attitude is important, but so too is
the frequency in which you’re checking in with your colleagues. In the
beginning of this book, I described how three of my Finnish colleagues, after
one month of school, told me that they were concerned that I wasn’t spending
enough time in the teachers’ lounge. One of these teachers told me she needed to
pay a daily visit to the lounge, where she would slow down and reconnect with
others. When I started to visit the lounge more often, I found that the simple act
of sitting down for a few minutes with my colleagues (typically on a daily basis)
paved the way for greater collaboration.