Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms

Timothy D. Walker

W.W. Norton (2017)

“Five elements for a joyful classroom”

Walker’s suggestions, however, aren’t faddish at all, and most of them are perfectly adaptable to our conservative system. He breaks down his 33 strategies for a joyful classroom into five elements: well-being, belonging, autonomy, mastery, and mindset.

Well-being includes scheduling “brain breaks,” when teacher and students alike can switch focus and absorb what they learned in the previous session. Some kind of physical activity works fine: get students to put what they’ve learned on posters and stick them up on the walls in the classroom and hallways, and let each student explain his or her poster as the class comes to it.

Students with a sense of belonging are clearly going to do better than those who feel estranged from their classmates. And teachers who feel they belong are going to teach better. Walker reminds us that North American teachers engage with their colleagues far less than the Finns do.

What’s more, the Finns have developed “student welfare teams,” including the school’s principal, nurse, social worker, psychologist, and special education teacher, who can help teachers deal with problem students.

It also helps that Finnish teachers generally stay with the same class for at least a couple of years. They know the kids, the kids know them, and everything works better.

Both students and teachers enjoy an autonomy in Finnish schools that we can only dream of. The kids are used to looking after themselves, not being hovered over by anxious parents and teachers. Teachers are trusted as professionals, not suspected as lazy incompetents. Finnish education has a national curriculum, often revised, but how the teachers implement it is up to them.

Mastery, as Walker describes it, involves project-based learning to teach the essentials. Describing a botched project he developed, he points out its flaws: too many clever innovations, each OK by itself but in total demanding too much work from students and teacher alike. Teaching the curriculum was lost in the details. His Finnish colleagues, he realized, generally stick to “traditional, teacher-centered classroom instruction” using textbook exercises to pace the students and track their progress.

Notably, mastery also includes plenty of music in the classroom. Far from being a frill, music lessons are central to improving literacy and language skills. Walker cites a study by the American Psychological Association that found music training actually helps rewire children’s nervous systems and enables them to concentrate better.

The last key element, Walker says, is mindset. Finnish teachers aren’t concerned with being the best at spotting and nurturing future stars; they want everybody to thrive and enjoy learning. The concept of the “master teacher,” he argues, is foreign to them. Cooperation, not competition, is critical for teachers and students alike.

Some Finnish practices could be adopted or adapted for Canadian classrooms right now. Others would require changes at the school board or ministry level. But Teach Like Finland can certainly make both teachers and parents realize that — good as our schools are — they can be even better for everyone.