Michael Lawrence and Dr. Fabio D'Agostin | Creating Schools…

As we endure our umpteenth lockdown here in Victoria, Australia, like many others, I have found myself with time to reflect.

When I first visited Finland in 2016, it was at the behest of a friend there with whom I shared musical interests and I imagined that visiting Finnish schools might give me a few ideas to share with my teacher colleagues back home. In the schools I found students engrossed in, and owning their learning. The students were reserved, exceedingly polite, and absorbed in their studies. Years later, when we were teaching in ‘remote mode’ during another lockdown, I asked a Finnish friend how they had been coping with remote learning.

“The students are determined to not let it interfere with their studies” was the reply, which summed up the kind of ownership for their learning I had witnessed there in previous visits.

I almost immediately decided that we, in Australia could do this. I determined to look for any reasons why it was not possible to replicate what I was seeing there, in Australian schools. The students were much the same: typical teenagers or younger, who enjoyed music, sports, and rebelled in many of the same ways. But, as one American teen, who had gone to Finland as an exchange student put it: school was not one of the avenues for expressing this rebellion.

Finnish teachers were certainly of an excellent standard, but in my decades of teaching in Australia, I had rarely seen poor teachers. The CEO of a chain of international schools recently asked me whether he would have trouble recruiting excellent teachers in Australia. My answer was a definitive ‘No’, adding that most Australian teachers are excellent however they frequently find themselves spending years teaching standardized curriculum to standardized tests where their skills and creativity are severely limited.

Finnish teachers have great autonomy on what they teach, how they teach it and how they asses it. They are viewed as professionals and the career of teacher is top of the list for desirable occupations there. They are trusted. They are taught to learn best practice, then to try and find a way to improve on that. They are encouraged to take risks, experiment and be innovative. They are trusted professionals.

In Australia we have a ‘teacher shortage’, yet statistics tell us that some 50% of our qualified teachers are no longer in the profession. Not so much a teacher shortage as a shortage of teachers wanting to practice in the system as it is. Teacher attrition is very small in Finland as teachers derive a great sense of meaning in their work, and they are highly respected members of society as it is understood that the future depends on them.  

This professional autonomy meant that my Finnish peers were constantly working with different teaching methods, often in small teams of their own devising and adjusting curriculum or assessment materials (“Why are you Australians so obsessed with grades and marks?”) as they thought best suited their students. There was no standardized testing, no ranking of students (‘When is a piano student ready to do the fifth grade piano exam?: somewhere between 5 and 95 years of age’) or schools (When was the last time a football coach paid a visit to another team to share a few of the secrets they had developed?). Competition is replaced by a healthy attitude to learning for its own sake.

Finnish educators asked me if all my students were the same, and if not (for they obviously are not!) why did I teach as if they were? More than 100,000 Australian students turn their back on education every year (the figures are difficult to obtain as these young people have literally fallen through the cracks) and countless others simply bide their time in the classroom, praying it will end and they can put it behind them.

The cost of this to society is incalculable.

Every one of these students has talents, abilities, skills and interests. But our schools system tells them that they are not valued. I recall a Yr.8 student, Matt, who on the first day of classes told me, “Mr. Lawrence, I’m no good at English, in fact I don’t like it at all. Just letting you know upfront.” I found that Matt was into fishing in a big way, and each Monday I’d question him as to where they were biting and how he had fared in the weekend’s fishing. He had a deep understanding of the relationship between the tides, the different baits and techniques and the habits of various fish species and it quickly became obvious that if I were to assign him to write a piece about catching fish in Port Philip Bay, it would likely be very good. But I had to teach the novel the entire Yr.8 cohort is studying. Had teachers been able to work with Matt on English work which appealed to him during his previous school years, he likely would never have felt that he was no good at English. Indeed, he may have developed such a positive attitude that he would have been happy to study a book which had little to do with his personal interests. I could have asked him to write about fishing anyway, but we have taught that if something is not being graded, it is not important, and as a teacher I would not be permitted to consider this work in the standardized assessment program.

I thought I would outline all of the above and the theories, neuroscience and statistics behind them in the book Testing 3,2,1 which received excellent reviews but was simply destined to join the pile of education writers and experts (Sir Ken Robinson’s Ted Talk is the most watched Ted Talk with 65 million iews!) agreeing that education needs to change.

This was clearly not going to be enough to bring about real change so I began talking with connections in Finland and we developed a PD program for Australian schools (it is now available elsewhere) with the Educational Sciences branch of Tampere’s University of Applied Sciences. With content from the university in the form of video interviews and a Finnish teacher’s Toolbox of sample lessons, and other materials the one day program finishes with an hour Zoom to a panel from the university who are able to take questions in real time from the Australian participants.

The icing on the cake has been gaining support from world-renown education authority, Prof. Pasi Sahlberg, meaning we now had the world’s best to provide insight into the workings of the Finnish education system. While progress has been stalled by repeated lockdowns in Australia the program debuted in Orange NSW in Term 2 and a handful of schools in that region have now employed changes to their daily timetable and teaching which have been enthusiastically received by students, teachers and the wider school community.

Whenever I wonder why I am working on this when I could be planning a comfortable retirement teaching in a nice, respectable school, I remind myself of the thousands of teachers walking away from the profession, and the hundreds of thousands of students who decide that learning in Australian schools is not for them.

There are a number of exciting developments currently being planned for 2022.