Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms pdfdrive com
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8 Teach Like Finland 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms ( PDFDrive )
TEACH LIKE
FINLAND CHAPTER 1 Well-being WE MOVED TO HELSINKI IN LATE JULY, AND BEFORE school began in mid-August my family and I spent several evenings strolling though our new city. In every park I remember visiting, I saw an unfamiliar sight: dozens of locals doing nothing but sitting on blankets, drinking wine, and chatting. They weren’t in a rush, it seemed, to get anything done. They were simply enjoying those warm, sunny evenings with their close friends. Life in Finland seemed much slower than the pace of life I had experienced in America. And I confess that, after living in high-powered Boston, I was initially attracted to the relaxed atmosphere in Helsinki—but I remained skeptical of this approach to life. What were these folks ultimately achieving, I wondered, by simply lounging around for hours on those blankets? Despite burning out during my first year of teaching, I was still clinging to this ideology—years later in Helsinki—that my worth could be quantified by my productivity. “Tim, you’re not a human doing,” a mentor teacher in Boston used to remind me. “You’re a human being.” Even in Finland, those were words I still needed to hear. I think the slower pace of this tiny Nordic country eventually rubbed off on me, because during those first weeks of teaching in Helsinki I tried to be more intentional about working less after school. When I returned home in the late afternoon, I left my schoolwork in my backpack (something that didn’t feel natural, initially) so I could focus on playing with my one-year-old and catching up with my wife. In Helsinki I was starting to feel more like a human being, but I confess that it was a different story at school. Initially I wasn’t prepared to adopt a different approach to my work as a teacher. And my Finnish colleagues were starting to notice. Just as my wife had told me, at my Helsinki school I found frequent fifteen- minute breaks throughout each day, and typically my colleagues were spending many of these breaks in the teachers’ lounge. (During breaks, several teachers took turns supervising the younger students outdoors and the older students indoors.) But even after three weeks of school, I still hadn’t spent two free minutes in the lounge taking a break with my colleagues. I’d only quickly enter that space to fetch my mail every morning, and then I’d make a beeline to my classroom. In those brief moments of entering the lounge, I saw something similar to what I discovered while strolling through parks in downtown Helsinki. Many of my colleagues were sipping coffee, flipping through newspapers, and chatting leisurely with one another. And, oftentimes, when I walked by the lounge, I heard them laughing loudly. I was starting to suspect that my colleagues were lazy. In September, over the course of a week, three of my Finnish colleagues told me that they worried I might burn out, because they hadn’t seen me in the teachers’ lounge. I admitted to them that I was spending all of those fifteen- minute breaks in my classroom, working hard on different teaching-related tasks. These three colleagues suggested that I change my routine. At first I laughed off their concern. I told them I knew what it was like to burn out, and I assured them that I was doing just fine. But they remained steadfast: they were serious about the importance of taking little breathers throughout the day. One of my colleagues told me that she needed to spend a few minutes every day in the lounge, slowing down with other teachers. She claimed it made her a better teacher. At the time I felt so confused because my impulse to work nonstop—often sacrificing my well-being in the short term—didn’t seem like something that many of my Finnish colleagues supported. I had always believed that the best educators were the ones who worked the hardest, even if it meant surviving on a few hours of sleep, skipping lunch breaks in exchange for more time for lesson prep, and never finding any time to socialize with colleagues. Many of the teachers I had most admired in the United States were brimming with passion for their profession, just like me, but always seemed to be on the brink of burning out. But in Helsinki I didn’t see my Finnish colleagues working through lunch breaks or hiding in their classrooms for the entirety of each day. Almost always, they looked relatively stress-free compared with what I had seen in American schools. And, unsurprisingly, their students did, too. I’ve heard several critics of the Finnish education model suggest that one major reason the United States can’t learn from this tiny Nordic country is cultural differences. But I think this is one area where we can learn from Finland’s schools. As Americans, our cultural priorities—which seem to say, ultimately, that chasing success (or “being the best”) is what matters most in life —greatly diminish our well-being and, consequentially, the well-being of our nation’s children. The push for America’s kids to succeed starts, for many of them, as babies. This is especially evident among wealthy families. Parents purchase flash cards and educational games, and for toddlers they scout out the best preschools, institutions that may cost more than $30,000 a year, to give their kids an early academic edge. Scores of American parents decline to send their children to kindergarten, a concept researchers call redshirting, so that their kids will be a year older and more developmentally advanced, which would translate, hypothetically, into better academic performance. During the middle school years some parents slap bumper stickers on their cars that read “Proud parent of an honor roll student.” In high school, many students are advised to pad their resumes if they want to get into the best colleges, so they stretch themselves thin by maintaining high GPAs, loading up on extracurricular activities, taking AP classes, and signing up for private SAT tutoring. This pressure to excel in high school varies across the country, but in some places, like Palo Alto, California, suicide rates among high school students are staggeringly high. Emma Seppälä, a researcher at Stanford University and the author of The Download 1.64 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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