Cleverlands Page 6

  Seventy years later, teaching is still popular, but it’s no longer looked up to in quite the same way. According to Emma, who is of the age at which young people choose their future careers, ‘I do know a lot of people who want to be teachers actually, but I don’t know, yeah, it’s respected for sure, but it’s not a big deal.’ She didn’t put it on the same level as being a doctor, for example. An international survey by the Varkey GEMS Foundation supports Emma’s perspective. They asked a representative sample of 1,000 people of 21 countries to rank various professions based on how much status they had, and the Finnish respondents ranked teachers lower than respondents from Britain or America.58

  Nevertheless, it is still a hugely popular profession overall, with applications for places on teacher training courses far outweighing places available (by a ratio of 10:1 in the capital, Helsinki), allowing those who run the course to be very picky about those they let in. Primary teaching is particularly popular (though not all secondary teaching subjects are equally oversubscribed – there is a still a national shortage in maths and natural sciences teachers in Finland). To get a place on a teacher training course, applicants have to go through two sets of tests, both written and practical. They first have to read a series of articles related to education, and then write an essay based on them. They then have a practical demonstration of their potential teaching ability, and an interview that checks, among other things, their moral commitment to teaching – selecting for those who already have that sense of purpose.

  Why does teaching remain such a popular profession, when its status is not as high as it once was? Emma gives us a clue: ‘You do have crazy training to become a teacher. So in that way, yeah, it is respected. It’s like, “Oh you’re doing all that school? Just so you can teach? That’s pretty cool.” You really have to work for it – they don’t let just everyone be a teacher.’ Finns also rank teachers highly when asked for the kind of job they’d like a potential marriage partner to have. So while it’s not high status (or particularly high pay – about average for the OECD) it is respected as a job that requires both moral commitment and professional expertise. It is the latter, not the former, which marks it out from the teaching profession in England and America.

  Mastery

  The ‘crazy training’ of which she speaks is a five-year masters degree in education, which is funded by the Finnish government. Primary-school teachers spend this time studying education at one of the eight universities in Finland that offer teacher training, in addition to a school placement, and they cover all the subjects that they will have to teach the children in school (including ice-skating, I was delighted to discover, as they have to teach this in PE). Secondary-school teachers, on the other hand, do just a one-year education masters after their subject-based undergraduate degree; they are still studying for five years, but only one of those years is focused on education specifically.

  What makes them masters level degrees is that the courses include research training, and all teachers produce a masters level thesis in an educational topic of their choice – Reeta did hers on the gendered language used in English language textbooks. They are taught the latest educational science based on up-to-date research on teaching practice, and complete a placement in a special teacher training school (like a teaching hospital) – an essential part of their training. Emma had a trainee teaching her religion class for almost the whole of her last semester, with the regular class teacher sitting at the back making notes.

  Much has been made of this masters level training in various explanations of Finland’s PISA success, but as with almost everything else, there is no evidence available on whether this feature itself made a difference.59 Whether or not adding the masters level qualification itself helped raise Finland’s scores, teachers in Finland have been better educated than the rest of the population since the beginning of compulsory education – contributing to the impression of mastery – and even before the introduction of the masters degree, teacher trainees received two–three years of education in how to teach, recognising it as a job that required expertise.

  When I asked Marjo-Rita about continuing professional development, she explained that there are a certain number of ‘learnings’ that teachers have to go to each year, which they choose themselves based on their needs, but that they also have to do a lot of independent studying in their spare time. As someone who worked in the public sector in England, when I hear ‘have to’ I interpret that as meaning ‘forced to and monitored to make sure you’ve complied’; but that is not what she meant. She meant that you have to read books, study documents, and discuss research with colleagues in order to be a good teacher: ‘I don’t feel like I can do my job properly if I don’t study every now and then.’ This, for me, is a pretty good indication that the Finns got the first two prerequisites for intrinsic motivation right in this case – they selected someone who has a sense of purpose, and they trained her to be able to understand and apply her understanding of pedagogical research.

  Relatedness

  Now, I’ve no evidence that Finnish teachers have more ‘relatedness’ – positive relationships with others – than anyone else. In primary schools they do meet at least weekly to plan together. They do have mentors when they first start teaching, and they do have 15-minute breaks between each lesson during which they’re able to sit and chat in the staff room over extremely strong coffee. But none of this is particularly unusual. They don’t have positions of authority within school other than the principal – all teachers within a subject department, for example, are on an equal professional footing. They don’t have performance-related pay, or anything else that might put them in competition with one another. Perhaps these features contribute.

  Something that is likely to add to Finnish teachers’ (and students’) sense of relatedness is the prevalence of small schools. In the early 1990s, there were over two thousand schools with a student population of fewer than 50. These schools were embedded in the community, meaning that your maths teacher was likely to bump into your mum in the queue at the post office at the weekend, and get you in trouble if you hadn’t done your homework. However, since the recession of the early 1990s, many of these schools have been shut down and their pupils bussed to bigger schools, with the numbers of rural schools gradually declining over the past two decades to just 660 in 2012. While this does not appear to have affected student outcomes,60 it may affect the quality of students’ and teachers’ relationships, and there are fears that closing these schools is a threat to the identity and vitality of surrounding villages, which rely on schools as a centre for the community.61

  For the sake of the bigger picture, whether or not Finnish teachers have more ‘relatedness’ than teachers elsewhere, I will share with you some interesting research on why ‘relatedness’ matters, in addition to its effects on intrinsic motivation. ‘Relatedness’ is similar to the concept of ‘social capital’, which describes the strengths of the relationships a person has with others, and the value arising from those relationships. For teachers in a school context, this would include sharing ideas and learning from one another, and having strong social capital would mean these relationships are characterised by high trust and frequent interaction.

  The effect of social capital on student achievement was explored in a study of more than 1,000 teachers in elementary schools in New York by Professor Carrie Leana from the University of Pittsburgh. Teachers completed questionnaires about who they talked to when they needed advice, and how much they trusted the source of the advice they received. The researchers also tracked student progress in maths over a year. They found that students showed higher gains in maths achievement when their teachers reported frequent conversations with their peers that centred on maths, and when there was a feeling of trust or closeness among teachers.62 The relationships between teachers are therefore doubly important – they improve individuals’ motivation, and they also appear to be associated with their effectiveness.

  Autonom
y

  Mastery, relatedness and a sense of purpose still might not be enough if Marjo-Rita were to have her efforts to be a good teacher frustrated by bureaucracy or micro-management. Don’t get me wrong: there is still bureaucracy involved in being a teacher in Finland – such as the requirement to document the interventions you’ve made with struggling students before requesting input from a special teacher – but they do have autonomy over how they teach, and to some extent, what they teach. Teachers really are trusted in Finland. Once they are qualified there is no teacher evaluation process; there is no one looking over their shoulder at what they are doing.

  Ilpo explained, ‘It goes through our culture that if you’re paid for something, you’re obliged to do it, and you don’t want someone looking over your shoulder; if you get that it makes you perform less in fact. There’s also a historical reason for that.’ He paused and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Good question! I knew you’d take the bait.’ he said. ‘Finnish history in short is that in the 1100s came the Swedes, as the crusaders, and well, they kind of got Finland under control over the next two or three hundred years. We were then under Swedes until 1812, and then came Russians. Both Swedes and Russians thought that Finns were second-level citizens, and they looked over our shoulders. And from those hundreds and hundreds of years in our Finnish culture, there’s always been a feeling of “Hey, I do my job, go away, you don’t have to look over my shoulder”.’

  This feeling meant that teachers felt it particularly keenly when they were told how to teach during the comprehensive reform in the 1970s. As described earlier, teachers found themselves in a completely new kind of teaching situation where they were faced with children of different abilities, and were expected to get them all to reach a reasonably high academic standard. This required not only new pedagogical techniques, but a new philosophy of education, which not all teachers at the time shared. In addition to on-the-job training, teachers therefore underwent regular inspection, managed by a strictly centralised steering system to check that they were teaching the new curriculum as they were supposed to, and not keeping up the old ways.

  It was only once the comprehensive system was firmly established and teachers were doing what they were supposed to do that the inspections were dropped, as was the requirement for schools to use centrally-approved textbooks. In 1985, a new curriculum framework was introduced, allowing municipalities (regional districts) and schools more autonomy over how they interpreted the core national curriculum, although even now there are national requirements over how many hours should be spent on each subject. These days, teacher autonomy is highly valued among Finnish teachers to the extent that many say they would consider leaving the profession were they to lose it.63

  So while purpose and mastery (by which I mean expertise rather than a master’s qualification per se) have been features of the Finnish teaching profession since the beginning of compulsory schooling in Finland, the feature of autonomy has not always been as constant. Surely, autonomy is not always an unqualified good – it depends on the qualities, beliefs and expertise of those who exercise that autonomy. While Finnish teachers have always been highly educated, there was a time when their training and previous experience was no longer sufficient to take on the new, enormous task expected of them – and it is important to remember that this period of reduced autonomy may have been necessary for Finland’s later success. Since the 1980s though, when it was decided that inspections were no longer needed due to the consistent quality of teaching being observed, Finnish teachers have had autonomy over how to teach and what resources to use in teaching, thus completing the triumvirate of relatedness, mastery and autonomy that supports intrinsic motivation.

  Is it really autonomy?

  A group of researchers from the University of East Anglia in England were called in by the Finnish National Board of Education in 1996 to visit 50 Finnish schools and watch lessons across the country, in order to understand how teachers were using the curricular freedoms granted to them. The findings of their report were a surprise:

  ‘Whole classes following line by line what is written in the textbook, at a pace determined by the teacher. Rows and rows of children all doing the same thing in the same way whether it be art, mathematics or geography. We have moved from school to school and seen almost identical lessons, you could have swapped the teachers over and the children would never have noticed the difference.’64

  Although just a small sample, this was a report of the situation in Finnish schools just four years before the PISA 2000 tests announced Finland’s students to have the highest scores of all the countries that took part, and suggests a high degree of consistency between teachers and schools. Emma didn’t notice a big variation between teachers at her schools in terms of how their lessons were structured either. She described a typical lesson to me thus:

  ‘We’d come into class and be seated, and go through the homework. If you hadn’t done it there’d be such anxiety because they’d call out random people for the answers and if they picked you, you wouldn’t know! Then they’d see if anyone had anything to say about it or anything to ask. Then we’d go through the next subject we were going to talk about, like, “This is how it works, and that’s how it goes”, and we’d make notes and ask questions and discuss, and then they’d give us some exercises to do from our workbooks, and that would be the rest of the lesson. The teacher would go to individual people if they had questions. But it depends on the subject. It was like that in maths, but in languages we’d have sets of work, like oral pair work and games.’

  Comparative video-based research on maths teaching in Iceland and Finland also shows Finnish teachers taking a consistently traditional approach with the lessons led by the teacher, but with substantial whole-class interaction, such as class discussion and student presentations.65 All 20 of the lessons filmed in Finland took a Review-Lesson-Practice structure, similar to the one described by Emma. This is in contrast to the approach taken by Icelandic teachers – a country similar to Finland in many respects but with significantly lower PISA results – in which half of the teachers in the sample took a more individualised approach, with students spending more time working independently on different things, and receiving one-on-one teaching where time allowed. My point here is not that this traditional approach led to Finland’s high results, but that there appears to be some evidence of surprising consistency in teaching styles amongst Finnish teachers, compared to elsewhere.

  This relative uniformity of approach in Finnish classrooms makes sense of the fact that there is so little variation in scores between different schools and regions in Finland. But does it call into question the idea that Finnish teachers really do have autonomy over how they teach? Is there some hidden pressure on them that means they all take a similar approach? You’d be very sensible to ask these questions, but be assured that the answer to them is actually ‘no’. Finnish teachers really can teach how they like – these days. The similar approaches to teaching styles and lesson structures you see across the country are not due to these styles or structures being enforced, but rather come about as a result of quality control in two other areas: teacher training and resources.

  A Different Approach to Quality Control

  Some people look to Finland’s education system, and to their teachers’ professional freedoms, and argue that if teachers elsewhere were left to get on with teaching how they saw fit, then their students would score highly in maths, reading and science too. I don’t believe that this would uniformly be the case. Students in some schools would do better, but students in other schools would do worse, depending on the quality of the teachers and the school management. There is only value in someone doing what they think is best with no oversight if they have both the right intentions and the required expertise to bring about their intended goals – purpose and mastery. Without the former, teachers may not be bothered to put in the work required (an unfortunately com
mon sight in some developing countries is a teacher asleep at her desk). Without the latter, teachers may charge ahead enthusiastically with some new teaching strategy, without knowing whether it works, or having the practical expertise to make it work.

  Finland only gets away with trusting their teachers to the extent that it does because it is able to control both the intentions and the expertise. They have enough people applying for the teaching profession that they can choose to only admit those who are motivated and passionate about educating young people. They then run teacher training programmes in only a handful of highly prestigious universities, allowing for quality control of these courses and the skills of those who graduate from them.

  That the Finns have enough people applying to teaching to be this selective is partly historical, but also partly because it’s an appealing job for all of the reasons laid out above. Enough good people want to work in a meaningful profession, they like to be experts, and it is appealing to be trusted to do such an important job (without all the extra workload brought on by the monitoring and observations present in some other countries). It seems like a chicken and egg dilemma to replicate the Finnish model, until you remember that teachers in Finland haven’t always been trusted as they are now; inspections existed until teacher training – in universities and on the job – made teachers good enough to no longer be inspected (in the eyes of the authorities).

  The fact that teacher training courses are nationally coordinated (but not mandated, allowing for some local variation and initiative66) might help explain teachers’ similar teaching styles. If research suggests that there is a particular way of teaching a certain concept that helps students understand it best, why would you do it any other way? Lessons are still adapted to suit different children’s interests and needs by using different examples or different activities, but the fundamentals of how children’s brains work do not change across different parts of Finland. In the same way, you would not expect to see huge variation in the way doctors treat appendicitis across the country, or even the world, but that is not because doctors lack autonomy; it is because their practice is guided by research.