IASCE Forum

Pasi Sahlberg describes how cooperative learning developed in Finland and the challenges it faces today. Unlike other countries we heard about from Forum members, in Finland, the initial push for cooperative learning, in the 1970s, did not come from universities, but from centralized school reforms. 
 

Cooperative Learning in Finland
Pasi Sahlberg    

The context

Finland is the northernmost member of the European Union with just over 5 million inhabitants. It is known for its world-class high-tech industry, democratic governance, the lowest level of corruption in the world and the most competitive economy. Schools are independent and teachers are free from external control such as inspection, testing or assessment. The most common mode of instruction remains the traditional presentation-recitation method, flavored by occasional use of alternative teaching methods, including cooperative learning.

One atypical feature of the Finnish school system is that teachers at all levels are required to hold a Master’s degree. Their courses provide a substantial theoretical framework so that they can comfortably discuss and construct deeper understandings of pedagogy, including cooperative learning. However, this is not to say that cooperative learning is more prevalent in Finland than in any other country. Scientifically oriented teacher training has also created skepticism among teachers, especially among the most experienced ones. Many of them believe that cooperative learning is nothing but another fashionable movement in the long history of education reforms.

Teachers are free to choose the most appropriate teaching methods in their classrooms. Class sizes are rather small and classrooms are well equipped. All schools enjoy the freedom to design school-based curriculum. The majority of parents are liberal in terms of their expectations from teaching methods. Representatives of labor markets, student associations and individual educational theoreticians continuously encourage teachers to move towards focusing on cooperative attitudes and skills. There are no external or administrative obstacles to prevent Finnish teachers from using cooperative learning in their work.

Early years of change

When the unified nine-year (grades 1 to 9) comprehensive school was created in the early 1970s, the leading pedagogic principle behind it was 'groupwork’, based on ideas initially developed by Professor Matti Koskenniemi two decades earlier. The majority of teachers were quickly trained to use small group teaching. It was believed that in this way, pupils with different abilities and socio-economic backgrounds could be socialized to achieve desired educational objectives. By the beginning of the 1980s, the entire education system was transformed and all teachers were trained in 'groupwork'.

It is easy to guess that this simplified thinking about educational change and about small group learning did not lead to the intended outcomes. Experienced teachers in particular were cynical about pedagogical innovations and quickly reverted to conventional teaching cultures.

Cooperative learning re-emerged 15 years later, through universities, with the help of researchers and teacher trainers. The 1980s were years of pedagogical innovations that included the introduction of project work, new sets of teaching methods and connections with international education development networks, such as UNESCO’s INISTE and The Baltic Sea Project.

In the early years of the 1990s, Professor Viljo Kohonen and his research associates from the University of Tampere became acquainted with the work of David Johnson and Roger Johnson, Elizabeth Cohen and Spencer Kagan. This period in Finland was an era of intensive development of alternative teaching methods in schools. Cooperative learning appealed to teachers who began to realize that traditional instructional practices were not helping to achieve the more complex goals of schooling. Professor Kohonen published articles and organized the first cooperative learning courses in Finland during that time. Soon, an active group of teachers, researchers and teacher trainers formed a small professional community focused on cooperative learning. Some of them began to develop Finnish applications and models of methods, many of which were originally developed in North America.

Cooperative learning and the New Curriculum of 1994

Cooperative learning quickly became a fashionable and desirable topic in in-service training courses as well as in various school development projects. The first book on cooperative learning in the context of Finnish education was co-authored by me and Asko Leppilampi in 1994. At that time, thousands of teachers in all parts of the country took part in 2- to 8-day cooperative learning training programs. International cooperative learning specialists, such as Yael Sharan and Shlomo Sharan, Elizabeth Cohen, David Johnson and Roger Johnson, came to train teachers and teacher educators.

At the same time, the New National Curriculum (1994) emphasized the development of social skills, using student-centered teaching methods to raise the quality of learning. Many believed that cooperative learning was the way to realize these expectations. Indeed, the curriculum reform and the dissemination of cooperative learning were interconnected. Teachers also used cooperative learning methods to work out curriculum issues in schools.

However, earlier experiences and memories of the education reform of 1970s began to divide teachers into two ideological camps. Teachers who had experienced those new ideas 20 years ago still remembered the promise that ‘groupwork’ would solve the problems of teaching. On the other hand, many recently trained teachers with their shining new Master degrees, joined by some senior teachers, seriously believed in the idea of learning together rather than competing and working alone. The former camp raised its voice to say that cooperative learning had nothing new to offer. Teachers in the second camp understood the complexity of change from traditional teaching. Teachers' growing competence in cooperative learning gave them the understandings and power to deal with conceptual conflicts in the field.

Present situation – issues and dilemmas

As a consequence of globalization, competition has increased in Finnish schools. Teachers are trying to balance the competitive world and the more cooperative life in schools. Yet cooperative learning remains one of the best known single pedagogical ideas, and also the most frequently requested topic in school development projects.

Thanks to policy-makers, the Finnish schools are still relatively free from high-stakes testing and external student assessment. Teachers may still design their teaching as they see fit.

There have been several small-scale experiments on the different methods of cooperative learning. One is the use of Complex Instruction in foreign language teaching. This initiative was based in the University of Tampere under the supervision of Viljo Kohonen and has been greatly influenced by the thinking and work of Elizabeth Cohen and her associates. The conceptual framework of cooperative learning developed by the Johnson brothers is widely adopted. Group Investigation is used in several primary schools and in some universities due to active support from Yael Sharan and Shlomo Sharan.

Since the beginning of 1990s, my colleagues and I have been trying to promote a more comprehensive perspective of cooperative learning, free from any separately identified school of thought but rather focused on an understanding of the basic principles and on the mastering of fundamental skills. This perspective has been developed under various school improvement projects that I have had the pleasure to lead. Furthermore, we have expanded the ideas of cooperative learning to school leadership, educational administration, and to the world of corporate management.

Cooperative learning remains a challenging area of educational development in Finland. The following three issues are among the most burning ones at the moment.

Issue 1. Lack of in-depth training. The majority of teachers think that they are able to learn how to implement cooperative learning by attending short training courses or workshops only. Consequently, most teachers have a superficial ‘knowledge’ of cooperative learning and lack an extensive and in-depth understanding of how to use cooperative learning in their teaching.

Issue 2. Cooperative learning is inadequately included in pre-service teacher education programs. Most university-based teacher preparation programs still underestimate the role of cooperative learning in teaching and in teacher education. When it is included in the teacher education curriculum, it is handled mostly as a theoretical issue. Consequently, newly trained teachers have 'heard about' cooperative learning but are not sufficiently trained to use these methods in teaching and learning practice.

Issue 3. Weak research base. There is practically no serious research on cooperative learning in Finland, despite some work done by Viljo Kohonen (2001) and his colleagues, and myself with John Berry (Sahlberg & Berry, 2002; 2003). For example, not a single doctoral dissertation has been written on cooperative learning in Finland despite its prevalence and popularity among teachers.

One of the dilemmas concerning the better use of cooperative learning in schools is related to availability of instructional materials. In 2002, we edited, with Shlomo Sharan, the Finnish version of the Handbook of Cooperative Learning (2002) for Finnish teachers and trainers. However, teaching materials, such as worksheets, games, project manuals, and so forth, do not yet exist. Many teachers find it hard to make the transition from the Handbook to the classroom. Book publishers are not interested in producing materials for any one methodology.

Finally, the flourishing of cooperative learning in schools depends on the extent to which teachers teach primarily for students' social and cognitive development rather than for tests and exams. Until now, cooperative learning has had fruitful soil in which to grow. Results of the recent PISA study (Program for International Student Assessment) indicate that the Finnish way of respecting and trusting teachers will not only bring about good learning results but also motivate teachers to try out new educational ideas without fear of making mistakes nor of blame for 'failure'. Yet more research and longer-term teacher development programs are needed to enable cooperative learning to become a permanent pedagogic approach in teachers’ and teacher educators’ professional repertoires. According to our research on students’ ideas and teachers’ beliefs, cooperative learning has all that it takes to become a central approach among schools who seek to educate citizens for knowledge-based societies and a more peaceful and tolerant world.

References

Kohonen, V. (2001). Towards experiential foreign language education. In V. Kohonen, R. Jaatinen, P. Kaikkonen, & J. Lehtovaara (Eds.). Experiential learning in foreign language education (pp. 8-60). London: Pearson Education.

Sahlberg, P., & Leppilampi, A. (1994). Alone or together? In search of cooperative learning (in Finnish). Helsinki: University of Helsinki Press.

Sahlberg, P., & Berry, J. (2002). One and one is sometimes three in small group mathematics learning. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 22(1), 82-94.

Sahlberg, P., & Berry, J. (2003). Small group learning is school mathematics. Turku, Finland: FERA.

Sahlberg, P., & Sharan, S. (Eds.) (2002). Cooperative learning handbook (in Finnish). Helsinki: WSOY.
 

Pasi Sahlberg, Ph.D., is a Senior Educational Specialist at the World Bank in Washington, DC, U.S.A. His email is psahlberg@worldbank.org.  The views are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the World Bank or any of its affiliated institutions.