As I was touring Suomenlinna Sea Fortress off the coast of Helsinki in July 2016, I encountered a group of children excitedly playing and engaging with three actors portraying the noble people of the late 1700s. The king’s crown had been lost and it was up to the children to help Gustav III find his missing diadem. Although I couldn’t quite follow the Finnish storyline, there were a few things that were quite clear to me. First, the children were doing the work; they were in charge of finding the clues and the adults were not providing much assistance except when a performance was needed. Second, the engagement level was probably the highest I’ve ever seen for a group of children spending a summer day at a museum. “Kuningas ja Kadonnut Kruunu” (The King and the Lost Crown) represented the epitome of Pasi Sahlberg’s first paradox from Finnish Lessons (2011 and 2015): “Teach Less, Learn More.”
Part of the “Teach Less, Learn More” phenomenon is fairly straightforward; the students attend less school, but still outperform many of their counterparts on international assessments. Finland historically does better than the United States on tests such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literary Study (PIRLS) in spite of the fact that during nine years of primary and lower-secondary education, Finnish students attend fewer than 7,000 hours of school, compared to almost 9,500 hours of schooling for students in the United States (Sahlberg, 2015, p. 88). North Carolina law, effective in 2013, requires schools to provide a minimum of 1,025 hours of schooling a year (or 185 days of school). The question that most of us would ask in response to these striking differences is, “How is this disparity possible?”
First, the Finnish believe in what is called, “Minimally invasive education.” This means that educators believe that children should have opportunities to learn in unsupervised environments either individually or collaboratively with others. Additionally, minimally invasive education includes the idea that teachers can and should provide students with the opportunity to utilize the 4 C’s (collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and communication) within lessons as opposed to preparing kids for tests. The Finns don’t do a lot of standardized testing and when they do rare testing, it is skills-based and applicable to the real world.
Second, and the most important piece, in my opinion, of this paradox is that educators in Finland are teaching fewer hours, which allows them to be more effective, and thus, allows students to learn more in a shorter amount of time. It is very common in Finland for teachers to engage in curriculum planning and professional development weekly, which allows for the teachers to develop more practical and engaging lesson plans. In a poll that I sent out to educators via twitter, seven of 10 teachers were in favor of shortening the school week in exchange for weekly professional development and curriculum planning.
I know that prior to my time as a teacher, Wake County developed a schedule that gave teachers an hour of protected time every Wednesday afternoon for PD and collaborative planning. This was a time teachers devoted to one another and where everyone in the school could serve an important role. This is different from regular planning time where we sometimes don’t have a common time to work together and where more often than not, we are pulled away for IEP meetings, parent conferences, or class coverage. From what I can gather, this initiative was attractive to teachers because of this protected time, but difficult for the parents who had to deal with alternative schedules weekly, thus giving this day the name “Wacky Wednesdays.”
With funding for professional development going down, we need to find a way to embed more professional development/planning time into our schedules in order for us to continue to grow as teachers, thus allowing our students to learn more. I don’t believe that the time to do this is before or during school. Teachers already come distracted to meetings and don’t always feel that their time is being utilized effectively. My argument would be to find something similar to the Wednesday schedule, where we could have protected time during the day either on a weekly or bi-weekly basis in order to collaborate more frequently and effectively. While some may worry about lost instructional time for our students, it’s imperative to note that Finland proves that it isn’t about the number of hours our students are in school, but rather, the quality of education that our kids receive on a daily basis.
Now, as I said when I started this blog, I want to be realistic. No, I don’t believe our calendar laws will change anytime soon and I don’t think we will all of a sudden be provided with a schedule that allows for consistent professional development that isn’t after school. What I do know is that great teachers find ways to develop life-changing and important lessons that will provide our students with the opportunity to learn something that matters. My next blog post will dive into the ways in which many teachers are already using methods that could be considered “minimally invasive,” thus giving the students a chance to take control of their own learning. I will explore student choice, smart block, genius hour, and even discuss the collaborative opportunity that my students shared with students in Sweden last spring.
Comments
Post a Comment