Ideas born in international winds

Hello Argentina & Uruguay!

This year I have been privileged in many occasions to talk with people from many different countries. First at Lapland International Forum for Education (LIFE2017) in Rovaniemi, where we also had a workshop on Pedagogical Leadership – Empowering School Community. Last few days I have had pleasure to be part of Symposium of Turkish Private School Association in Antalya and now in Istanbul. The workshop held there by Learning Scoop was focusing on new curriculum reform and its practices. #GAES17 takes you to the symposium feed on Twitter and on Instagram.

I will share some of the recent ideas with you:

• On-line learning is handy way to communicate and share ideas with people in faraway countries. (Most of the countries are far away from Finland) But studying alone with computer is not easy or motivating for most of the teachers that we have met. So, we designed a model called “Learning Circle” for in-service training purposes. It means that teachers learn to learn together in learning circles.
  In learning circles participants are able to speak their own language when sharing ideas and only one computer with internet is needed. Happy to tell more about this!
  

  Two power teams: FinPro Turkey and Learning Scoop

• Not only teachers and principals need education, but also parents. Sometimes it is good that someone outside of own community comes to talk and ask questions from parents as well. This has been proven also in Finland many times. Parents love to be active in parents meetings and share their experiences with others (all us do.. and still we sit so much quiet in trainings). So nowadays we also offer tools for school-home collaboration and for parents´ evenings.
• Pedagogical leadership, learning organization and community are themes that come across all the time in Finland and more and more also in discussions with foreign people. How to get started or how to make it to be part of everyday school life? That is a good question and we have some tested ideas that we would love to share and further develop them with the schools here and there.
• How to start building trust in your own community of work? Trust has been an interesting topic of many discussion. Trust is always one of the key issues that foreign teachers pick from Finnish schools and society. How to promote trust in your own classroom or among the teachers? We absolutely would love to be there, start and study such process.

Tomorrow I carry on getting new ideas when I meet experts from Istanbul and by the end of the week many interesting meetings in Malta and one workshop more.

Good and interesting life!

Elina