In a quiet classroom adorned
with the joyful creations of small children, Ville Sallinen is learning what
makes Finland’s schools the envy of the world.
Sallinen, 22, is teaching a
handful of eight-year-olds how to read. He is nearing the end of a short
placement in the school during his five-year master’s degree in primary school
teaching.
Viikki teacher training
school in eastern Helsinki describes itself as a laboratory for student
teachers. Here, Sallinen can try out the theories he has learned at the
university to which the school is affiliated. It’s the equivalent of university
teaching hospitals for medical students.
The school’s principal,
Kimmo Koskinen, says: “This is one of the ways we show how much we respect
teaching. It is as important as training doctors.”
Welcome to a country where
teaching is a highly prized profession. Finland’s teachers have kept the nation
near the top of the influential Pisa performance rankings since they were first
published in 2001, leading to an influx of educational tourists as other teachers
have endeavoured to learn from the Finnish experience.
Finland is going through a
deep economic crisis, and there are financial pressures on schools, just as
there are on the rest of the public sector. But the five-year master’s degree
for primary school teachers is not in question. Competition is fierce – only 7%
of applicants in Helsinki were accepted this year, leaving more than 1,400
disappointed.
Leena Krokfors, professor of
teaching at Helsinki University, says: “The beef in the Finnish teacher
training system is the time that students have to learn, and while politicians
are happy for Finland to produce good teachers, that’s OK.”
Teaching in England seems to
be somewhere between administration and giving tests to students
The high-level training is
the basis for giving young teachers a great deal of autonomy to choose what
methods they use in the classroom – in contrast to England, Krokfors says,
where she feels teaching is “somewhere between administration and giving tests
to students”. In Finland, teachers are largely free from external requirements
such as inspection, standardised testing and government control; school
inspections were scrapped in the 1990s.
“Teachers need to have this
high-quality education so they really do know how to use the freedom they are
given, and learn to solve problems in a research-based way,” Krokfors says.
“The most important thing we teach them is to take pedagogical decisions and
judgments for themselves.”
In Britain, by contrast,
academies, private schools and free schools can hire people to teach even if
they are not qualified. Labour claimed in 2013 that becoming a teacher in
Britain was now easier than flipping burgers.
For a small, agrarian and
relatively poor nation, educating all of its youth equally well was seen as the
best way to catch up with other industrialised countries, according to Pasi
Sahlberg, a Finnish educationist at Harvard who has done much to popularise
Finland’s methods abroad.
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The Finnish dream, as he
calls it, was for all children, regardless of family background or personal
conditions, to have a good school in their community – a focus that has
remained unchanged for the past four decades.
In the early phase, during
the 70s and 80s, there was strict central direction and control over schools,
state-prescribed curriculums, external school inspections and detailed
regulation, giving the Finnish government a strong grip on schools and teachers.
But a second phase, from the early 90s, consciously set out to create a new
culture of education characterised by trust between educational authorities and
schools, local control, professionalism and autonomy. Schools became
responsible for their own curriculum planning and student assessment, while
state inspections were abandoned. This required teachers to have high academic
credentials and be treated like professionals.
Krokfors adds her own
explanation for the high regard in which teachers are held: “If we look back at
Finland’s history, teachers have always been seen as the people who brought
civilisation to small villages” as the country modernised in the middle of the
last century, she says.
Not only is teacher
education in Finland strongly research-based, but all the students on the
primary school master’s course are engaged in research themselves – a point of
pride for Patrik Scheinin, dean of the faculty. The course aims to produce
“didacticians” who can connect teaching interventions with sound evidence, he
says.
“We want to produce
cognitive dissonance. The task of a good didactician is to disturb the thinking
of someone who assumes they know everything about teaching,” Scheinin says.
“Just because you’ve been doing something for 20 years and it works for you
doesn’t mean it works for other teachers, other students, or in other
subjects.”
In the city centre at
Helsinki Normal Lyceum, another of the 11 university teacher training schools
scattered around the country, student teachers are running day-long
multidisciplinary workshops for pupils aged 13 to 19. In one, Maria Hyväri, 24,
is discussing Dewey, Steiner and Montessori, and asking pupils to think
critically about teaching methods at the school. Classes are mixed and there is
no streaming.
Teachers in Finland are
autonomous professionals, respected for making a difference to young people’s
lives
“I want to make a
difference,” she says. “There are all these new teaching tools and ideas, and
it’s great because here we can try different things – it makes me feel
inspired.” Because the school is full of student teachers, pupils are “used to
being experimented on,” she says, although sometimes they might get a bit tired
of the constant rotation.
Hyväri is in the middle of
an undergraduate degree in French and English, but she has chosen to take an
additional pedagogical year in the middle of her five-year degree, which will
launch her on to a teaching track in her final two years to emerge qualified as
a secondary school teacher. During this year she spends about half her time in
the school, and half in the university’s teaching department.
For Olli Mättää, a teacher
trainer at the school, Finland’s Pisa scores are a byproduct of the system rather
than a central goal. “When we got the results, we were thinking, if we are that
good, how bad are the others? We were taken by surprise,” he says.
It showed that the country
was doing some things right, he says, and vindicated the decision in the 1970s
to make primary school teacher education a university degree. Teacher training
schools are highly sought after by parents, Mättää says.
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Educationists point to
historically specific factors that have helped to fashion Finland’s schools,
such as the country’s small population, its relatively late dash for modernity,
and broad acceptance of values such as equality and collaboration that are
embedded in its version of the Nordic welfare model. But the decision to make
teaching an advanced degree subject has given teaching a high profile in
Finnish society.
“Teachers in Finland are
autonomous professionals, respected for making a difference to young people’s
lives,” says Sahlberg.
As a result, those who
choose to train are devoted to teaching for life, he says. “My concern is with
fast track teacher preparation programmes turning teaching into something you
do for a while and move on, and almost anyone can do it.”
Back in primary school,
Ville Sallinen got the teaching bug eight years ago while still at school, when
he started coaching football. It sparked his interest in working with children.
He is not particularly academic, he says, but like many students his passion
for teaching got him on to the master’s course.
“I would like to have more
experience in schools like what we are having now,” Sallinen says. “Next year
we have no practical element. It is good to get experience in a real school.”
At the end of each day, he
sits down with his mentor, Tunja Tuominen, to deconstruct teaching moments and
to theorise them. Says Tuominen: “Student teachers come here like little
chicks, mouths wide open and eager to learn.”
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