Finland Travel Log: Less Pressure on Teachers, More Respect for Students

Below is the fourth in a series of posts I'm writing from Finland,
as part of a trip with a delegation of U.S. education leaders. For a
week, we're immersing ourselves in Finland's top-performing education
system. (Read parts one, two, and three for more reflections.)

Students at Kallahti Comprehensive School

Today I visited Kallahti Comprehensive School
(Grades 1-9) in Helsinki. Kallahti serves 450 students; 30 percent of whom are
immigrants, from Russia, Pakistan, and Somalia. When we arrived, the school’s headmaster, Timo
Heikkinen, greeted us at the front door of the horseshoe-shaped building, a
structure that allowed as much of the Finnish sun as possible to shine through
its many classroom windows.

A Relaxed Pace

When I walked in, I felt an “ease of pace” that
is rarely found in American schools. Finnish schools are well supported with a
child-development infrastructure that guarantees every child a pre-primary
experience between the ages of three and six. This pre-school experience strengthens
children’s self-esteem and autonomy as learners. You could see the benefits
clearly in how older children and young adolescents behaved and tuned into
their teachers at Kallahti. The foundations of the Finnish day care system,
described briefly yesterday, show up in the perfect manners of teenagers in the
school cafeteria.  

Respect for Differences

Walking down the halls, observing classrooms,
and having lunch with students, teachers, and the principal, I felt the
enormous amount of respect that everyone had for one another. Each student’s
culture, religion, and language are honored. In fact, we learned that educators in Finland
view the “mother tongue as the tool of thinking.”

In Finnish schools, differences in language, religion, and culture are respected and embraced.

Special education students are not stigmatized—at
all. And at Kallahti, four special education teachers
assist their colleagues in adapting instruction for students with specific
needs. 

Room for Development

There are five-week crash courses on how to teach in Finland. (For a rich description of why Finnish schools
are successful, see LynNell Hancock’s article published
by Smithsoian.com, as well as this Channel
One video clip.)

That said, Kallahti Comprehensive, as described
by headmaster Timo Heikkinen (who is highlighted in LynNell’s article and the
Channel One clip), is “not a school at the top. Timo would like to see more
coordinated time to teach subjects in depth and not in “one sitting” (i.e., 45
minutes). He’d also like more coordinated professional development for a staff
that he says is, for the most part, “very, very well prepared.”

I learned that while the Finns support a highly
centralized approach to preservice teacher education, their professional
development is funded solely by municipalities and can therefore vary greatly. Perhaps
this is why we saw some outstanding teaching, as well as some very traditional
approaches.

The Big Takeaway

The Finns have built a terrific infrastructure
to support kids and their parents—allowing for solid teaching from virtually
every teacher and translating that teaching to extraordinary results for
students. 

As we learned today in a debrief session back at
the Center for International
Mobility (led by the venerable Pasi Sahlberg,
author of Finnish Lessons),
teachers want to teach in Finland because they have "big freedom.” Every
teacher seemed to have so much patience—and
worked at an even, unrushed pace. They weren’t pressed into frenzied teaching
by high-stakes tests like so many of their American counterparts.

And parents have deep trust and confidence in the
Finnish teachers—a sentiment echoed by Tuomas Kurttila, executive director of
the Finnish
Parents’ League.

I want to conclude by sharing what I thought was one of the most insightful analyses of the
day, from Nick Donahue of the Nellie Mae Foundation (and one of the 30-plus
delegates on our study tour): “In the United States, we rush to implement
technical solutions and ignore the kind of community and culture context."

The Finns do the opposite. It is clear that they value children, seriously fund education and day
care, and invest in teachers. In the United States, teachers are seen as an
expense, not an investment, and while our policymakers say they value children,
they do not back up their lofty rhetoric with the right policies and programs.