Thinking 2013

In November, the Finnish National Board of Education published the first draft of the national curriculum framework of basic education. This started a nation-wide discussion on the future of education which will, hopefully, continue all through the year 2013 and which all teachers and students and other stakeholders will take part in.

To stay up-to-date schools will need to be increasingly connected with the surrounding society locally, nationally and world-wide. International contacts and networks, partner classes and different kinds of learning projects will provide our students with the skills they’ll need as citizens of the global world.

Learning in an authentic context in collaboration with one’s peers makes learning meaningful, creates a feeling of involvement and enhances commitment. Authenticity is also at the heart of the phenomenon-based learning. Creative ideas are born and thinking skills develop in an open environment in which different cultures, languages and points of view meet.

As the world is changing and technologies are developing at an accelerating pace, many of the ‘good old’ practices need to be questioned. Teachers can’t be experts in every topic and individually responsible for the student’s development. Instead we need collective responsibility and shared expertise, co-teaching and team work.

To integrate the use of new technologies in learning we need the students to bring their own devices (BYOD) to school and the informal learning of the students to be recognized and made use of. The students will learn more and more outside school. When they bring their knowledge and skills to the classroom, they'll enrich the learning process and promote thinking outside the box. The school must be ready to take advantage of this. Learning contents can’t be so narrowly defined that the developing technologies and approaches, innovative ideas and individual learning paths won’t fit in.

I hope that the New Year 2013 will lead us towards the school of the future. I hope the discussion on the new curriculum framework will spread to every corner of Finland and changes of learning culture will start to take place. I hope we teachers open our hearts and minds and welcome the world in our classrooms. I wish you …

The Future School - School in 2020

In November I gave a three-week online course for nearly one hundred eTwinning teachers from all over Europe. The topic of the learning event was the future school. We watched videos and presentations, and discussed future trends together. Participating teachers shared opinions and ideas about the future of learning in small groups comparing different scenarios.

The same issues worry teachers across Europe: the poor economic situation leading to cutbacks that target schools and educational development, the enormous pace of technological development impossible to keep up with without major education policy changes and concerns about technology replacing human interaction.

When discussing what  future school buildings and learning environments would be like, a large part of the teachers were in favour of large, spacious and adaptable areas containing workstations for various activities and facilities that support learning in groups of various sizes and independent work. Virtual environments will allow individual learning paths, learning together in international projects, large scale interaction with the world outside and overlapping of school and free time activities.

On the whole, the participants felt that, in the future, collaborative student-centered learning methods will be prevalent. By working together students learn important skills: communication, knowledge-building, creative thinking and learning to learn, of which the last one, the teachers considered of a special importance.

Teaching profession was discussed using five different scenarios. Many participants found especially interesting the scenario in which teachers specialize in one or two different learning methods. Teachers offer a variety of learning paths for students to choose from, so that they can follow the path that suits their learning style best and is the most motivating and appealing. This scenario is built on the idea of teachers’ continuous professional development, networking and cooperation. Flexibility and student-centered learning methods are its corner stones.

You can read more about the learning event here. If thinking about the future with other teachers interests you, there will be a new course in April 2013.

Here you can read the results of the team work:

Open publication - Free publishing - More education

First posting

At the moment I'm working as project coordinator in the Mentor Programme for the Internationalization of General Education. It's funded by the Finnish National Board of Education. Its ultimate goal is to mainstream international education in the new national curriculum framework and the local curricula which will be applied from August 2016 onwards.

To reach that, I'll be working together with experienced teachers and experts all around Finland to create regional strategies and networks to make different kinds of international projects, multicultural happenings and global education an integrated part of every pupils' and teachers' yearly schedule. I can't see this possible without radical changes in the ways we teach and learn today.

I bought my first Olivetti pc in 1986. Ever since I've used computer in my dily studies and work. For over ten years, I've been interested in implementing ICT in international projects and learning in general. In 2004 I started experimenting with Moodle environment, which turned out to be very applicable in different European learning projects. Since that, I've been coordinating quite a few eTwinning, Comenius and Grundtvig projects and have given lectures, workshops and online courses dealing with the pedagogical use of different Web 2.0 tools and collaboration of students and teachers in online learning projects.

With my new job and with the new national curriculum framework being under construction in Finland, I feel now is the time to start blogging about all these issues that interest me in the schools and education of today and tomorrow. Future is there, just one leap away, and I'm not going to be the one standing and passively waiting for it to roll over. There's a lot we can do to be able to look at the future with hope instead of fear, to feel empowered instead of intimidated.

Let's go global!