Julie Walker, Executive Director, American Association of School Librarians and Board member, Partnership for 21st Century Skills.
I hope Bernie Trilling is reading this entry. The school we visited today organizes its instruction around a yearly theme. For this school year, the theme is “growing up as a human being.” What a concept for grades 3-9 to contemplate. And contemplate they do, as inquiry is the basis for all instruction in the school.
I felt as if I had walked into a true school community (note, not “community” as a cliché). As a Supreme Court justice once said about pornography, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” The school is “administered” through teams (note, not “team” as a cliché).
Each team is organized around one of six focus areas --- thinking skills, technology, international cooperation, active citizenship and organizational well-being. Each team is responsible for seeing that their focus area is blended into the curriculum. Organizational well-being is also reflected through a Student Union, a board composed of representatives from grades 3-9 and an additional committee for student welfare. Each student is the responsibility of all teachers. In each classroom, the “climate” is characterized by mutual respect. The concept of citizenship is also evident in the way that the students, without dependence on lines or signals, bounced through the school in an unrestrained but orderly manner --- most of them in their socks (it’s a Finnish thing!).
The Finnish system (and particularly this school) affirmed for me our thinking in the Partnership for 21st Century Skills framework (www.21stcenturyskills.org) and AASL’s new learning standards (www.ala.org/aasl/standards). On the other hand, the absence of a school library media program that meets the expectations that we have set in the U.S. was most noticeable.
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