Preschool to High School | Finland Vlog - Part 4

[Music] we're on the train getting ready to go to our first PD but that is the outside the library that I took you guys to yesterday someone said it's made to look like an open book I haven't seen that but I wasn't really paying attention we're on the train run our way to the PD the first task you know for sure we're going to visit a preschool so any teachers out there that could be of interest to you and after that I think we're speaking to students there's a little bit of uncertainty because the schedule we obtained a little bit but for sure we're starting with three students but the finishes are long like our long day of professional development we have like two sessions of it there is no built-in sightseeing between [Music] [Applause] the year you turn 7x equals they like that so I don't know what the correct term for the year like year 0 is that pre to be called la school pre-k yeah yeah yeah but that one year before you know pre-screen okay okay when I when I talk about preschool or we we mean that year 0 before you okay our loom I know it you're so professional you knew not to get in that job [Music] so we're taking a turn to school as you guys can see is a beautiful school it's a new school it's I think only been open 7 months it's an experimental like school so now all schools are designed like this but it's gorgeous oh this is this is the that's the teachers lounge in there it's a very look one copy machine this is the teachers lounge here that's the director's office going to spinners there's containers of these these are real in with my 5th graders with soft starts here we have like we have like a chain of daycare centers where they spend every day always okay there's more specialized yes yeah like a never outdoor learning a lot of thing and my god but as you heard this cost as well I don't know if the cost is probably so this is a example of their anti-bullying sign they are learn to say stop I don't like that as the first way to resolve their issues with their classmates this is another example of their choice board where they want to go and then you can see they have these flags up from different countries multiculturalism is very important to them here [Music] [Applause] we just finished lunch I look really dramatic with my blanket scarf on my hand because it's not even raining but I'm just prepared we just had lunch at that place I think you pronounced it office super good and now we are looking for a bus to take back to the location we were yesterday it's like we keep forgetting the name of it because it's kind of long as the Finnish National Education Agency I think so we're trying to take a bus so that we don't have to walk all the way there so yeah shamika's back there somewhere there she is with Jill she friends are in front of me I think what I'm gonna do is at the end of each day I'll have to like sit down and give you guys my like takeaway from the days but today's visit to the preschool was really really good I send a lot of notes which I'm surprised by since I don't teach preschool and I have no desire to I was just very impressed and into what that particular was doing so I will definitely be sharing my notes with you guys on that so we're off to the next session and then I'll check in with you guys [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] it's too many in the middle but the idea is that we will have always one free chair so we need five volunteers first go in I sit and the conversation will happen inside the fishbowl but all of us please come closer and the idea is that you're gonna start talking about something I can decide it all the students can bring in you know stuff and if we wanna take part there's a free chair if somebody sit in one of you has to get up so that there is always a free choice so that yeah and of course I mean this is not all about talking this is also about listening skills so and that's what I sort of with my talker students and lights or more introvert student students you know try to make personal goals that today you're always saying so today and so on so next way to say if you ever dare to go in we might make like this month once but anyway today's topic is the Bachelorette what's the topic I was thinking about okay since you come from the land of standardized but there are there is proof and maybe you have cracked the code as well how to teach innovatively and student-centered me and the kids do well talk about that how does it happen why but what's the secret sauce to having students perform well on students to not not to have innovative and sun-centered pedagogy and the students are humanists where you constantly talk about so we are we just learned different strategies he uses in his classroom to make sure is like a student student-centered class my favorite shows you so far is fishbowl because I had never done that before I mean at the get rid of it before so while we're on this break we're hoping that the students show up no that sounds bad we're waiting for the students to show up they will be here because I think I just saw them making the lobby and I think they're teenagers and the oldest might be twenty so we're just kind of free to ask them any questions we have I kind of want to know how they feel about school because I know as a fifth grade teacher what I have would have my old fifth graders come back after being in middle school for a while they would always come back and have like this nostalgic feeling about elementary school about that was when they thought school was fun and then when they go to middle school they seem to lose like that feeling of fun so I'm wondering if that something they feel and if not that might mean we're doing something wrong and the United States once kids get to that level but I'm just curious to hear what they have to say and then when we're done with them I think we're done with a question of today there's Tia pretending to be busy across the table but I don't know if they want to be on camera would you guys like to be on camera one says no one's gonna wake ya so we're looking forward to that [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] alright so we just finished our professional development of the day these aren't the sweet highschool girls that they did a great job provided from inside you want to see earning money Sonny huh Julia and they are like the cutest high school students I've ever seen their makeup and style is on point and I need to be better but they did agree so we're just so happy to meet them they did under awesome huh I guess I'll say good evening Shamika just informed me is 1024 despite the fact that you see sunlight topping off my face good isn't slight outside I've been here since Saturday it's Thursday and you would think by now I still wouldn't be like shocked by the fact that it's 10:30 at night and if I wanted to I can go out and jog a mile at minimum and still come home and not be dark that's beside the point so today was the second day of professional development I can't remember the last thing I said but it was hours ago and I think we were on our way back yeah I think it was after lunch and we were on our way back to the educational center to talk about communication in the classroom and then talked to some finished high school students which we did no get to that in a second but in the morning we started off the day by going to a preschool and I think the town or the city was called Montes which is outside of Helsinki first things first they let us know that this particular preschool was an experimental learning environment so they wanted us to know that what we were seeing there was not really gnorm for preschool children on a day-to-day basis in other cities so for them preschool would be considered what we also call daycare through like kindergarten really because they can have kids from the ages of infancy all the way up to seven seven years old is where they are is when they are officially required to start school if they start and I and they start at the kindergarten level and they are required to have four hours of instruction a day but kindergarten was not mandatory four years ago so given the fact that this is a experimental learning environment a couple things they pointed out that was interesting is that the kids are active participants in developing the things that they want to include so they involve the kids and ideas that they have to see if the idea is that they have actually play out the way that they believe that they will and they their main objective is to teach kids to play and increase their activity and interactions with each other and their goal is to have students and have students be involved in active movement for a minimum of three hours a day and they have three main focuses so again play is one of those three main focuses physical activity and the integration of technology now when they talk about the integration of technology for them it really is using things like augmented reality they have GoPro cameras where for us right now when we talk or at least in my experience at that age when we're talking about integrating technology the technology is used as a tool to like administer like a test or something so at that school the staff is in power to come up with these new and innovative ideas they are also provided training but they are really encouraged to just come up with things that are kind of outside of the box and out of the norm the school was very as you saw the little clips that I have you do it is culturally appropriate to take your shoes off when you enter the school so we did have to take our shoes off at the very beginning and some of us you may have already seen it's just I don't know how the footage came out so some of this might be redundant and if it is I apologize but in terms of the kids they really are just given the freedom to just free play all day there are some segments of the day where they have this little board and it's kind of like a choice for where the kids indicate what content area or what area do they want to plan so I think what she was explaining is whereas before they would have these pre designated areas that kids would go into and there were already assigned activities for those areas now they may have areas but there's no designated this is what you're going to do in that area they kind of want the kids to get there and explore that area and come up with it themselves and they could be picking it based on what is in that area or they may be picking it based on who else is in that area and whoever they're playing with they could be playing with that same group of kids for a couple of days so I thought that was interesting so it says some of the play groups last for a week and this idea is research-based that shows that it helps the kids the kids become more innovative if they spend a little bit more time together and that their play gradually evolves as they play with each other for longer periods of time so the other notes that I have this is more engagement once a week Oh some of this I'll forget but it's part of their play they take them outside to play also they do have a playground that I got some footage of but they also take them out into the woods sometimes and have them just explore up there which again is not something that is necessarily normal in the United States in terms of going out into the woods and it's not like a field trip that could be because they happen to be in an area where there's a lot of wooded area but the teachers that were in that room who are from all different parts of the country all kind of reacted with they're like wow that's that's interesting they do have an anti-bullying like a social emotional aspect they are teaching the kids the code they are supposed to learn how to say stop I don't like that they have a movement it is stopped I don't think that and they really encourage kids to solve their own problems so if I'm on the playground and i'm playing with my friend Shamika who's here and Shaniqua does something that I don't like my first response needs to be to do the whole stop I don't like that and if Shamika responds and and follows my directives them don't do that then it's resolved I don't need to go tell a teacher they don't want to be involved like they're done with it but if I do that and then Shamika doesn't like respond the way that I'm asking her to then I go tell a teacher but that teachers first question to me is going to be did you give her the code stop I don't like that and if the student says yes I did but she kept doing it then there will be some appropriate consequence but if they say no I didn't then they're gonna be retrained to make sure that you say that when that happens to you get in the future so kids of all ages at that school are taught that same procedure kids are taught at a very young age and they're introduced to the concept first with song and they're just learning the concept of the word stop at the school it was very multicultural there are 23 languages being spoken 56 of the puffers 56 of the population sorry is not finished and again that may be different from preschool to preschool and it just varies depending on where you are students are learning things like colors numbers and letters through the use of international flags so there were international flags on all the tables where they eat at and that's one way that they help them to identify different colors by using the colors that are present in the flag and the school's director who is the one that let this is really adamant to keep it that way she's very proud of the fact that it's multicultural and she wants to keep it that way they do have a space for celebrating different cultures that are outside of the Finnish culture and in terms of enrollment because someone asks like you know how do you decide who's enrolled they are gonna prioritize kids that have siblings so if I have a child already at that preschool and now it's time for another another one of my children to enroll just because I already have one there I'm higher on the priority list of getting my second child enrolled if I have a kid and I want them to attend that preschool but I have two cars I am now moved down the list of priority because they really want to service the people that maybe have transportation issues so of course they can't accept everyone but they do have a system as to how they decide who's gonna get accepted and who is not going to get accepted the other thing that was very interesting and very different is that gender and family dynamics and gender sensitivity is a part of the curriculum so it's not an issue for them to talk about families having two dads or two moms whereas I know in my experience that's really a topic that you have to be very careful about discussing in class and the other thing with there being so diverse they strongly encourage the kids to speak in their own language because they feel like the more a child is able to speak in there they call it the mother tongue or as we would call it their native language then that's only going to help them help them to develop language skills and finish so they encourage it whereas I feel like for us we're more focused on the assimilation of immigrant students and we want them to learn English as fast as possible and in some ways let go of their native language while they're at school the other interesting thing is there is an adult school that also comes in this is probably the cute and not cute it's not the right word like this is one of the things that I really liked so there's an Adult School somewhere in the area where these are adults who are coming here going to school because they've immigrated from another country and they're trying to get on the path to higher education in Finland but there are requirements that they have to fulfill but they'll come to the school and read to students using picture books and those students negative language so let's say I am a Russian immigrant living in Finland and I'm going to this Adult School on a monthly basis I'm gonna go visit the preschool with books that are in the Russian language and I'm gonna read it to the students who also speak Russian I thought that was great so those are the highlights of the preschool in the afternoon after lunch we went back to the educational center and then that's when Puteri or let me say it better pectin II was leading the professional development and it was really focusing on communication and collaboration in the classroom he's really big on trying to take a step back and doing less of the talking and let the students do more of the talking and he showed us a few strategies one was called the date clock where I took these little notes so you have a topic of discussion there it is and you have a 12 o'clock three o'clock six o'clock five o'clock you set appointments with your classmates and you're going to talk to those particular people at that particular time on a given topic I think I've done that before in a PD but I've never done it as a teacher then my favorite one was fishbowl what which I took some footage of you have six chairs in a circle one of the chairs stays empty you pose a question those six or those five students are discussing it anyone that's not in that circle of five with that empty chair is welcome to come into that empty chair so let's say like today we were talking about state testing in the middle of the footage you saw there was a circle with six chairs we started out with five teachers sitting he posed a question about state testing they started discussing when someone from the outside circle who when someone from the outside circle had something to say they were welcome to come into that sixth chair but as soon as someone sits in that six chair one of the people that was already there must leave so at all times there's only five people physically sitting in a chair and there's always one chair open and if you're not in that circle you're just there to listen so I really really liked that he talked about Socratic seminar which I'm not gonna go too much into because a lot of us know about that they do cooperative cooperative seating so they want kids to be sitting in groups not in rows groups of four that are heterogeneous but what I thought was interesting is they keep those kids and those seats for an extended period of time like a whole term whereas I know I've always been looked down upon by some teachers because it takes me a long time to switch seats I might keep kids and seats for a whole trimester and a lot of people say that's not a good thing because you need to give kids some different scenery but I kind of do it a because I'm lazy if I were to be honest I have other things that are more important than seating arrangements and changing it and see sometimes I just think it's important for kids to be able to work together for a long period of time to really establish like good dynamics and so that's kind of what I felt like he was saying there with their rationale and seating so after that we got to meet some finished high school students for girls so I know I got some clips up to just kind of talk to them about their experience and their live the students living in Finland they were very well-spoken very sweet we were all like in love with them by the time they left because they just had great personalities but I think they were just shocked by our high school dynamic where all the kids go to school at the same time and we were just as shocked by the fact that they don't and just really trying to wrap our minds around the fact that when kids complete the ninth grade or when they're about 15 years old they're kind of like done with high school if they want to be or they start they start going to school in the school that they're going to a model like college courses so it was just interesting and just fun at the same time but that was day two of professional development I feel like I talked really fast hopefully everything that I said was clear made sense but if you have question so you need something clarified leave it in the comment section I will do the best that I can tomorrow it's going to be day three and it is the last day of professional development and in the morning we have a training on I feel like it's project-based learning because that's the one we haven't done yet yeah project-based learning we'll have lunch and then in the afternoon we'll get to talk some talk to some teachers that teach in Finland and then kind of go from there so it's late at night even though you can't tell let me show you again what it looks like this is what it looks like at 10:00 10:30 8:00 Oh so um despite the fact that it looks like that I need to take a shower and go to bed I am kind of tired my feet were killing me today we've been doing a lot of walking but I'm gonna end today's vlog here and I will see you [Music]

Channel: SmartieStyle

Views: 6,512

Rating: 4.9111109 out of 5

Keywords: vlog, daily vlog, travel vlog, teacher vlog, teaching vlog, blog, teaching blog, finland, finland school system

Id: __U1JJjwNvA

Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 10 2019