I don't blog about work nearly as much as I'd like to. I am slowly getting over some of the initial differences between my students in the UAE and my students here. Students in the UAE tended to loathe small group work, and they did fine speaking out in class in front of all the other students - not that they loved presentations, necessarily, but if I asked a question to the class as a whole, someone or other would answer.
Here in Finland, it is all about the small groups. It took me almost all of last semester to figure it out. If I want to have the class learn something through questions/answers, I ask a few questions or put a few discussion points on the board/projector, have them talk about it in small groups, and then circulate to check in with each group's answer. If I dare to ask a question of the entire class, it is almost certain that no one will volunteer an answer. Last semester in one of my classes, I had a lovely girl from eastern Finland (generally considered the more talkative area of the country, and she owned up to that stereotype) who took pity on me and answered my inept all-class questions. I know it was out of pity because she said so one day - "I just feel bad that none of us are answering your questions so I'm going to."
Anyway, this is not what I came here to blog about! I came here to blog about this: one of my English Academic and Professional Skills courses this semester is for 2nd-year students in the faculty of Education. That's right: I am teaching Finnish classroom teachers. And they don't even know how famous they are. They don't even know that every other article in The Atlantic is about them, or that op-eds are being written in The Washington Post about them, or that America wants to BE them. Yesterday I was showing them how to use the library website to find journal articles about education in Finland, and they were surprised to see how many people are writing about them, in English. I told them that the Finnish education system is in the English-language news a lot and they were like, huh!
So even though I'm not teaching them how to teach, it is still super fun to help them learn how to operate academically and professionally in English. It's even more fun for me because the practice school where they do their student teaching (which they do more than once, starting in their first year) happens to be my kids' school! So I'm teaching teachers who are (student-) teaching my kids. Today I had a parent-teacher conference with Magdalena and her teacher, and two of my students sat in on it. It was very recursive.
It's been interesting to learn from my students along the way, too. We did a class activity a few weeks ago where we compared MA in Education programs in the US/UK/Australia and Finland. You may have read in the news that classroom teachers in Finland have MAs, and that's true - because it's an MA-inclusive program. You get a BA in about three years but it's considered incomplete because the full program is five years and includes an MA. They were looking at the websites of universities in the US and wondering how it was possible to get an MA in Education in two years. I had to explain to them that a BA would be prerequisite to such a program.
Each faculty group that I've taught (our class groups are tailored to certain majors) has a little bit of a different feel to it, and I'm really enjoying teaching these teachers. They are energetic and hard-working (so far, ha!) and eager to discuss issues in education...
...in small groups.
