The Alberta Teachers’ Association

The following is reprinted from Rethinking School Leadership—Creating Great Schools for All Students (Couture and Murgatroyd 2012). The article has been edited for length and to conform to ATA style.

Finland and Alberta demonstrate impressive rankings on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Whether on reading, writing, math or science, the results are near or at the very top. In a global policy context in which anxious public and policy makers worry about the ability of their students to navigate the many challenges of economic growth, population mobility and climate change, it would seem that Finland and Alberta both have much to teach others who are trying to improve their schools and their societies.

But an iron law of educational change seems to be that change almost always looks better at the macro level of government than at the micro level of the individual classroom in the individual school. One of us has seen this through years of intense study with the Boston Public Schools, which have been celebrated far and wide as beacons of hope in the U.S. public school system but which, in terms of their prosaic everyday challenges, struggle along, often with enormous injustices in terms of resourcing and teacher quality from one school to another. The other one of us has worked as a teacher leader and researcher in Singapore, another widely heralded high-achieving system that places phenomenal pressure on its young people to excel on secondary school placement exams. (For further discussion and analysis on the sense of disengagement reported by Finnish students, see Linnakylä and Malin 2008. The study was conducted by the OECD as part of PISA 2003. Details are in Willms 2003.)

These lessons invite educators to take a closer look at what actually is going on in high-achieving jurisdictions. Several years ago policy makers were surprised by data (World Health Organization 2004, 2008) indicating that Finnish youth were the least likely out of 34 nations to indicate that they felt good at school.

Alberta, on the other hand, suffers with the second-highest high school dropout rate of all of Canada’s provinces (Human Resources and Skills Development Canada 2012). Although the educational problems of Alberta are a far cry from those suffered by schools in the United Kingdom or the United States, for example, it still is easy to find teachers in Alberta who feel unappreciated by the public and micromanaged by government when it comes to the freedom to develop innovative curricula. This problem persists in spite of many years of government provisioning for an innovative network like the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI), designed to promote bottom-up change and experimentation. Furthermore, Finland and Alberta are not immune to problems with substance abuse, bullying and random shootings that perplex educators around the world.

The sordid, on-the-ground realities of life in schools as they actually exist in the here and now—with struggling students, querulous faculties, and anxious and sometimes pushy parents—do not mean that Finland and Alberta have not accomplished a great deal of good with their educational systems. They mean, rather, that the educational work is far from done and that each jurisdiction must resist the siren call of complacency in the light of their achievement results. Yet behind every celebration of high achievement stands the stultifying spectre of apathy. So how can we improve learning, and do so in a way that all of our students will find their schools places of fulfillment and joy, and our teachers have the right combination of pressure and support to help them reach their full potential as educators?

One of the more intriguing strategies explored in a variety of jurisdictions in recent years has been to network educators together, in the belief that exposing classroom teachers to novel practices in different settings will catalyze their internal sense of motivation and drive to probe more deeply into improving their teaching and learning. In some settings, this kind of networking has occurred within schools, and in other cases across schools and even across district boundaries. In Singapore, for example, it is common to find classroom teachers who have been seconded to the Ministry of Education or to the National Institute of Education. The goal is to break down different silos in the field of education and to create a continual flow of information that links theory, policy and practice into a vibrant and coherent profession.

Rarely, however, have educators had the opportunity to develop networks across geographically distant high-achieving jurisdictions and to inquire about the endless variety of instructional strategies, curricular designs, assessment instruments and organizational forms that make up what British sociologist Basil Bernstein (1975) called the four “message systems” of schools. It is here that Finland and Alberta are exploring the sharp edge of educational change in what is termed the Finland–Alberta or FINAL partnership.

Ignited in May 2010, at a Finnish–Canadian Education Forum in Helsinki, this alliance began with conversations about opportunities and challenges in educational change that both jurisdictions faced. Pasi Sahlberg, forum chair, spoke of the sea of opportunities possible from a new strategic partnership, while Andy Hargreaves from Boston College emphasized the importance of an evolving and sustaining international dialogue that would develop by building on the divergent strengths of the Finnish and Alberta experiences. Hargreaves cautioned against the continued reliance on approaches such as standardized curricula, technology disconnected from students’ life experiences and system-level reforms that are imposed on teachers without their consent or approval. Sahlberg provided a moving account of the Finnish experience and advanced the promise of “Fourth Way Finland” as an inspiring alternative pathway to counter the global education reform movements (GERM) that privilege system-level reforms over school-based reforms (Sahlberg 2011).

This first meeting in the spring of 2010 seeded many ensuing conversations and exchanges, with follow-up meetings in August, in Jasper, Alberta, and in November, in Boston, Massachusetts. At these events, both parties identified aspirational goals and developed an action plan to attain them. This culminated in December 2010 with letters of understanding exchanged between the Alberta Teachers’ Association, the Minister of Education in Alberta, and the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture in Helsinki. The first exciting step for this nascent partnership was for a Finnish delegation to visit selected high schools in Alberta. An invitational symposium, Educational Futures—International Perspectives on Innovation from the Inside Out, was held in Edmonton, in March 2011. This pioneering international partnership took flight with a team of 13 Finnish high school principals and ministry officials visiting Alberta high schools in Crowsnest Pass, Calgary, Edmonton and Grande Prairie. Two months later, 19 Alberta educators visited Finland to be acquainted with approaches taken in Finnish schools.

What did educators aspire toward through this high-level exchange? The FINAL partnership is transformational in that it is about the professionals themselves and their students developing school reform. Most high-level exchanges across countries are mostly confined to senior policy makers. The FINAL network, on the other hand, reaches all the way into the domain that matters most—that of the individual, the school and the classroom. FINAL is pursuing an altogether different strategy in educational change and reform that is bottom-up and side-to-side rather than top-down. As such, FINAL is a brilliant manifestation of what is described elsewhere as the “integrating networks” component of “Fourth Way” change architecture (Hargreaves and Shirley 2009, 99–101). This approach arises from a firm commitment and belief that if the professionals who work in schools every day are provided with real cross-cultural learning opportunities, the benefits in terms of innovation, learning and motivation will be enormous.

Stephen Murgatroyd, adviser to the FINAL network, posed the apparently simple but actually intellectually demanding question to the Albertan and Finnish delegations in spring 2011: “What makes a great school?” This question has required the educators to dig down deep to clarify their beliefs, purposes and aspirations as educators. It has forced them to ask about their own theories of educational change and what they mean for the students they are interacting with on a daily basis.

The following twin portraits reveal how Alberta educators in the FINAL partnership are improving the ways they support student learning and have implemented changes in their schools as a consequence of their participation in this project. Based on these two case studies, we distill distinctive features of teacher leadership that arise from cross-cultural learning opportunities. To this end, we provide evidence to illustrate how FINAL is providing a fresh impetus for teacher leadership that places educators in the front end rather than at the back door of change.

Jean Stiles: Modelling Continual Learning and Growth

Jean Stiles is the fast-paced, fun-loving and zestfully enthusiastic principal at Jasper Place High School, in Edmonton. An innovative and inspiring educator for 23 years, Stiles has taught and been a principal at the elementary, junior and senior high school levels. To accompany her through the halls of Jasper Place is to get caught up in a dizzying whirlwind of question and answer with her students, reaching all the way from the cliques that dominate the front entrance of the building to the almost painfully shy immigrant students who are still finding their footing in their new country.

In 2007, Stiles earned the highly competitive award of “Canada’s Most Outstanding Principals.” She uses her passion for student learning to challenge her faculty, to share her own ongoing search for better ways to teach and lead, and to have a good time while doing it. She is completely at home in the hallways of her school and her students all know it and love it. She is also the recipient of the Learning Partnership’s National Award. In recognition of her many contributions to education, Jean was inducted into Canada’s National Principal Academy in 2007.

Jasper Place High School has a diverse population of students with programs to accommodate them that range from innovative apprenticeships to the most challenging academic courses. As a Canadian immigrant herself, Stiles knows well the sense of displacement and uncertainty that new students can experience when trying to fit into a country far different from their countries of origin. This sense of compassion and her pronounced ethic of care permeate all aspects of her leadership.

Stiles wants her teachers to grow as inspiring role models for their students. She knows the wide range of research documenting the distortions that can ensue when teachers become locked into professional cultures tragically organized against their own continual learning. This means that she urges teachers to grow as leaders and to share their exploration of the profession with each other and with their students.

As principal, Stiles views teacher leaders as having three primary characteristics. First, teachers must model instructional excellence so that their students are enthusiastic and grow in confidence and knowledge every day. Second, teachers should be innovators who are willing to test new research-based practices to expand their pedagogical repertoires. Finally, experienced teachers have a professional responsibility for working with weaker teachers. Developing such leadership is difficult because it goes against the grain of how teachers are prepared and how they work on a daily basis in schools. “How do we influence teachers from a principal perspective,” she asks, “because there is such autonomy within a classroom?”

Looking at the Curriculum with a New Set of Eyes

Curriculum is more than just what is taught; frequently, it also encompasses how teaching is carried out. In Finland, “classroom teaching is very personal,” and as a result of this, educators there adopt a flexible approach to looking at the curriculum. What impressed Stiles and her teachers was that Finnish teachers seemed to “have this ability to get together and build on the thematic kinds of connections within a number of curricula and put those together as a course.” Inspired by this, Jasper Place High School staff has started to look at the curriculum with “a new set of eyes.”

Teachers have asked if the types of programs they offered were due to “the way we’ve set ourselves up, our structures” and wondered if in spite of their practical value, they might be “getting in the way” of deeper kinds of student learning. After much deep discussion and reflection, teachers decided that they could do better. They then examined different programs of study, found a number of connections between them that had not been made in the past and “built on that to make different kinds of courses.”

The new kinds of courses would allow for greater integration across subject lines. Building a school-within-a-school also led Stiles and her staff to challenge the usual assumptions related to class size and scheduling. They decided that they were still tied to the industrial class model and wanted to make a change. Stiles said

What we are looking at for next year, is taking a number of kids, say 120, and giving them five teachers from different subject areas, and just having a program for them, come from an appreciative inquiry kind of place, look at those natural connections. [There is no need] to worry about 80-minute classes. But to look at what makes sense for kids and to try to build a school-within-a-school. And try to break away from some of the ways we’ve tried to look at the schedule, driving what we’re trying to drive, driving instructional decisions.

Looking at the curriculum with new eyes also means re-evaluating the standard emphasis placed on academic learning. In fact, according to Stiles, a hot topic that permeates the informal network sessions among Alberta principals is its vocational aspects. And since returning from the visit to Finland, Stiles and one of her teachers have already started to shake things up.

One of the strategic approaches is to partner with the community. While in Finland, Stiles and her colleagues were impressed with the “far better connections into industry, into business than what we have.” Upon their return, this was an area that the Jasper Place High staff decided that they would get “really intentional about … and really setting up those systems and those partnerships.” The change is being initiated at the teacher level and the project was inspired by the Finns’ approach to vocational education.

Finnish society views vocational education as providing students with entry into multiple paths. One of Jasper Place High School’s work-experience coordinators noted that in Finland when a student reveals that he or she enjoys animal science, the response is not to tell the child to become a vet. Instead, teachers recommend more than 50 different possible vocations to the student. In addition, the Jasper Place High School team also noticed that industry was coming to work with the schools more in Finland than they did in Alberta. In fact, when entrepreneurs worked with schools, they presented their latest product prototype for students to work on and to learn from. This enables students to develop the most cutting-edge and market-savvy skills and to have the opportunity to use the newest and best technology. To this end, the entrepreneurs wanted students “to have a certain level, skill-wise that will allow them to … work for [the company].”

This experience enabled the Jasper Place High School teachers to think of their school in a different way. On their return, they did not hesitate to accept the offer of a business association that approached the school with an idea of talking to students about starting a small business. Mindful of what they had just seen in Finland, teachers organized a two-day session with business mentors that was attended by 210 Grade 10 students. According to Stiles, this event “opened the eyes of [the students] that are starting to think about what’s out there as they start to think about next steps.”

Leveraging on the idea of a vocational track, teachers next developed new internship programs for their students, with the aim of “getting kids into a work place or having them experience a different side of things.” The team established a new partnership with Habitat for Humanity. This out-of-school experience was novel for two reasons: it was not something carried out during the summer and the students were not paid for the internship. The aim was for them to have a real-life experience affiliated with, but also independent from, their school, as apprenticeships are organized in Finland.

Finally, in terms of new perspectives gleaned from exposure in Finland, teachers challenged the idea of single-age learning experiences. They combined this idea with community involvement in the Global Youth Assembly program. In this multigraded approach, teachers worked with 80 students who were interested in film and art. The final piece for the film course was the creation of the opening film for the Global Youth Assembly. Stiles said

What students had to do to get to the final product was to research the politics of water, get involved with all the community members and public interest groups around the politics of water. Take a whole lot of instruction from their teachers and from the community groups about film making. And the final part of the film was that they became roving reporters, activist media reporters, to put together this event for the film for the Global Youth Assembly. It’s something we’ve never done.

At the end of the day, the key feature of making a “school-within-a-school” was to find ways to “make curriculum more relevant, more integrated for kids.” To this end, Stiles was “always looking for ways to transform the teaching and learning for kids to make it even more relevant for them.” As such, her teachers were tireless in their efforts to “think about what practical ideas [they] can put in place.”

Encouraging Grassroots Change

Although she is the principal, Stiles believes in distributing her leadership because this allows her to “see in a more open environment to help make decisions.” Arising from the Finland visit, she has noticed that her teachers “have seen the things in Finland, and they are willing to try some new things.” As a result, her staff is having schoolwide conversations and teachers are talking about projects that they want to do.

One product of these rich conversations is a social media platform that teachers want to set up between Finland and Alberta. Since travel costs between Alberta and Finland are expensive, social media provide an easy and instant way for educators and their students to strengthen the FINAL partnership while saving on costs. The aim is for teachers from both jurisdictions to comment on student art and to learn from one another about how art is assessed in their different school settings. In a recent article (Stiles 2011), Stiles said

… in an art project, an Alberta teacher will share her assessment practices with her Finnish counterpart as they each assess the work of the other students and discuss the assessment process and how it affects their personal assessment strategies. Sharing teaching practices leads to informed thought about what makes a great school.

Grassroots change is most compelling when teachers remain for longer periods in each school. Unlike the situation in Canada, where educators (teachers and principals alike) often change schools every four to five years, in Finland, highly mobile teachers are viewed as undesirable and thought to be hiding from something. Therefore, it is common for principals in Finland to stay in one school for the whole of their careers, thereby providing communities with a source of stability and continuity. This permanence is the same with teachers; the Finns view staying put “as a huge positive that people will stay and build that family.” Building on this idea, Stiles has a new appreciation for “the stability [that] is allowing [her] and the staff to be even more creative” than before.

Ian Baxter: Building Social Relationships to Enhance Learning

Ian Baxter is the assistant principal and a social studies teacher at Crowsnest Consolidated High School, in the Livingstone Range School District. He has been teaching social studies in the school for 19 years and prides himself on his fierce loyalty and commitment to his school of 319 students. While some urban educators might view remote Crowsnest as too isolated, Baxter loves the sense of community, the closeness to nature, and the flexibility and creativity offered in a small-school environment where one can get to know all students well.

Situated in the mountains, the high school serves Grades 7–12. Baxter is grateful to live in one of the most beautiful areas of Alberta. The school has been experiencing waves of out-migration. The reduction in student numbers means that the school is unable to provide as wide a variety of activities and courses as teachers would like to offer. And for Baxter, and his principal, Wes Wescott, participating in the FINAL partnership has provided opportunities to discover new ways to embark on their mission as educators. More important, the partnership has enabled them to interact with other Alberta principals.

The compelling question guiding Baxter throughout his participation in the partnership is: “What makes a good school?” For him, this is not a question simply for educators and administrators to grapple with, but it is a pertinent and significant question for the students he interacts with daily. To this end, Baxter invited his students to respond to questions such as, “How does what we do here and every day make us a good school?” He is amazed and heartened at the responses from his students and the clarity with which they want good relationships with their teachers. “They can tell the teachers who want to work with kids, and those who are collecting a paycheque and just putting in time,” Baxter stated.

When his students watched Finnish educators touring their school, they realized that partnerships with other schools from other parts of the world are some of the building blocks of a good school. Outside educators bring fresh energy, new perspectives and a greater global awareness to their collective lives. Baxter believes that in a good school, educators need to be in the thick of the action, teaching classes and interacting with students from the start to the end of each day. It is important to him that his students see him as an educator and not merely an administrator. For this reason, Baxter and Wescott greet each student entering school building each day.

For Baxter, involvement in the FINAL network has given him the opportunity to examine how Finnish colleagues have provided enriching and meaningful learning for their students, to meet their needs and to ensure a purposeful life. Though the visit was short, Baxter was impressed with many aspects of the Finnish education system. He had flown to Helsinki with Stephen Harris, the assistant to the superintendent, and when they returned from their visit they proposed changes for his school and its Livingstone Range District. The changes they sought indicate how educators like Baxter are using the FINAL network to challenge their thinking about previous patterns in their schools and to integrate in new findings about Finnish practices that they believe will benefit their students in Alberta.

Meeting Basic Needs

According to Abraham Maslow’s (1954) classic hierarchy of needs, basic or “deficiency” needs at the physiological level, including breathing, food, water and sleep, must be provided before moving on to higher levels. For Baxter, this is a “great reference to use when educating students.” He wonders, if students do not have their basic needs met, “how can they possibly move up to higher-level thinking?” In the close to two decades that Baxter has taught, he has noticed that increasingly more students have been showing up at school hungry and upset. And these students are not just those who come from struggling families. As an observant educator, Baxter is sad that many students try to disguise their troubles and issues. However, when the problems persist, and students “are trying to juggle more things … it all implodes on them.”

To this end, Baxter and Wescott were inspired by the social support provided at a Finnish school they visited—free five-course hot meals were offered at breakfast and lunch daily. Baxter and Wescott were so motivated that upon returning to Alberta they started “an experiment to see how it works.” As with all innovations, the project started off on a small scale at Crowsnest Consolidated High School, serving breakfast twice a week to all students, not just those “deemed in need.” In fact, “any student in the school that feels that they need breakfast” is able to stop by. Baxter laughs and says that their breakfast is not as luxurious as what is served in Finland—it’s just “cereal and milk, or toast and jam. And [they’ve] been providing some yogurt,” as well.

Other than meeting students’ basic needs, Baxter feels that there is community building when students sit down and dine together in school. In his view, with the Finnish students they saw “having their lunch [in school], it was very much part of the school community,” in contrast to Alberta students leaving campus to purchase their meals at neighbourhood stores. Baxter and Wescott hope that community building through dining together will be something they can improve upon at Crowsnest High. With the provision of breakfast a success, Baxter hopes to serve lunch as well. However, he adds that the school will need to seek sponsors. To this end, his plan is to look for a corporate sponsor if the breakfast experiment is successful.

Meeting Educational Needs

One learning point for Alberta leaders participating in FINAL is to broaden their definition of success. This is based on the features and structures in the Finnish education system that educators, like Baxter, identified as benefiting Alberta students academically and vocationally. In fact, the Finnish approach to vocational education has impressed several of the Alberta educators we spoke to. For one, Baxter points out the types of skill sets introduced in the vocational programs in Finland were those that students “need to lead a purposeful and fulfilled life.” Unlike the relentless emphasis on academic achievement in Alberta, Baxter observed that teachers were “really directing and giving choice to students,” especially if these students were keen to enter vocational programs. The Finnish approach was to help students develop skills “that would provide an income for them, and a lifestyle.” He was also struck that students were not coerced into such paths but were “actually engaged” in the learning.

Examples of such programs are the welding class where students built fire pits, and the greenhouse project that saw students building stone walls as their final project. Baxter commented that the students he spoke to were positive and engaged in their work, contrary to the findings in some international studies that report that Finnish students are disengaged.

Eager to provide a similar educational path for Alberta students who are interested in vocational education, Baxter and Wescott approached their board administrators to engage a vocational teacher for their school to teach small engines. Their passionate appeal to cater to the needs of disengaged students was successful when a vocational teacher was hired for their school.

One challenge to providing a wider range of educational programs in the Crowsnest area is the declining population and resultant resource constraints. Yet, administrators were supportive. Stephen Harris remembers Baxter and Wescott being “incredibly strong advocates” of the trades programs that they saw in Finland. Leveraging on the partnership to “look outside the box to Finland,” the board decided to support Baxter’s and Wescott’s idea to provide an education that “allows more students to find their gifts.”

Through the FINAL partnership, Baxter learned new ideas to provide a wider range of curricular academic experiences for students. In fact, Baxter said that “this partnership has done a lot in terms of creating partnerships within schools … in Alberta.” For example, Baxter and Wescott, through discussions with colleagues from a school in Calgary, found an innovative way to restructure the way they scheduled science lessons. Although the partnership began between Finland and Alberta, there have been many benefits within Alberta because educators were beginning “to find out that there are many partnerships starting to emerge between teachers, educators and administrators.” While this was not planned as one of the initial outcomes, for Baxter, “it’s certainly one of the outcomes that have come about.”

The FINAL partnership has provided educators like Jean Stiles in Edmonton and Ian Baxter in Livingstone Range with the opportunity to better understand and change their schools, while at the same time hosting Finnish educators who, likewise, are reflecting upon and shifting their schools back home. Greater openness to apprenticeships, addressing students’ basic needs and enhancing a sense of community are all facets of education that Alberta educators are appreciating and adapting as a result of their novel exchange with Finland. It’s becoming clear that there are many paths to the excellent learning outcomes that are measured on international assessments and that real educators will probe beyond the surface level of tests to ask what their students really are experiencing in school.

The Practical Wisdom of School Leadership

Based on the portraits of Stiles and Baxter, what can we say about educational leadership and how it enhances and energizes learning in schools for teachers and students? Both work in schools serving different student populations in Alberta. Along with their colleagues, both visited Finland and interacted with Finnish educators and students, and both were inspired by aspects that they identified could make a difference to “what makes a great school” for their students. Upon their return, both enthusiastically and energetically entered into conversation with colleagues, administrators and students, and initiated structural and cultural changes to their school and district.

Far too often, change is top down and done to teachers and schools, without careful consideration of local needs and settings. As a result, there is a misalignment between the policy intent and the realities and practices in the classroom and school. In this study, we found evidence of bottom-up and side-to-side school and curricula change; bottom-up change emanates from the schools and educators themselves in response to challenging current assumptions and structures; in side-to-side change, educators took the onus on themselves to catalyze and cascade within and across their own settings and localities. Specifically, with reference to side-to-side change, both Stiles and Baxter actively organized sessions in which they presented their Finnish experiences to colleagues. Additionally, Baxter built on conversations with colleagues in Calgary to review the science curriculum in his school. In Edmonton, Stiles and her teachers created a model of side-to-side change where teachers responsible for different grade levels collaborated to develop a multi-grade learning experience.

Building on their experiences and through interviews and conversations with other Alberta educators participating in this partnership, we identified and distilled three distinctive features of FINAL as a Fourth Way change strategy. First, FINAL is guided by an inspiring, innovative and inclusive vision. Second, it involves lively learning communities that welcome contestation and debate rather than “contrived collegiality” (Hargreaves 1994, 186) that meets someone else’s predetermined goals. Third, FINAL is an integrating network with the right calibration of emergence and design to allow for both creative and practical, measurable outcomes.

Inspiring, Innovative and Inclusive Vision

The educators presented in our case studies are driven by a compelling and inclusive moral purpose that serves as the beacon guiding their work. Their vision of educational outcomes transcends narrow academic achievement and acknowledges the cultural richness and complexity of the whole child. For educators such as Baxter and Wescott, graduating students do not resemble cookies created by a cookie-cutter mould or a faceless product with a manufacture date.

How is this humanistic philosophy of education communicated to students? One way is through a school’s website. At Jasper Place High School (http://jasperplace.epsb.ca/rebels-define), each student entering the gates of Jasper High School is seen as “a rebel”—an individual “who stands out from the crowd,” “an inquisitive person who embraces a challenge” and a “passionate, adventurous and fearless character.” Another way is through active listening to students’ voices. At Crowsnest High, student voice is valued, appreciated and incorporated in all of its internal discussions exploring the question, “What is a good school?” The staff at Crowsnest is mindful that meeting students’ physiological, psychological and emotional needs is as significant as developing them intellectually and socially.

Stiles and Baxter and their colleagues strive to meet each child’s different needs and interests. This is why this group of educators was deeply moved and inspired by the Finnish approach to vocational education—strong and efficient social support and curriculum programs. Motivated and guided by the ideas gleaned from their trip to Finland in May 2011, these educators and their colleagues wasted no time upon their return to Alberta in challenging traditional assumptions regarding vocational education. While tweaking the traditional message systems of teaching and schooling, these educators have not disregarded the emphasis on literacy and numeracy that society deems critical for entry to college programs. What steers these educators is their deep commitment to meeting the interests of students who are disinclined and disinterested in academic college programs, but are keen on practical, applied learning.

The vision of the FINAL network provides a striking point of contrast to the global educational reform movement (GERM) described by Finnish educator and FINAL cofounder Pasi Sahlberg (2011). Transnational consultancies linked with a corporate reform agenda recommend continual standardization blended with marketplace models of change as the strategies of choice for those who would seek to improve teaching and learning. But there are other ways of conceptualizing change. One of us has worked in Singapore where “white space” has been created in the curriculum for teachers to create school-based curriculum innovations. This movement is part of a call from Singapore’s Prime Minister for teachers to “teach less” so that students can “learn more” (Lee 2004). This compelling vision conceives education as preparing students for the “test of life” rather than a “life of tests” (Shanmugaratnam 2005). Like the “white space reform” in Singapore, the FINAL partnership between Finland and Alberta provides educators with another way of understanding their work and policymakers with another set of options to consider.

Lively Learning Communities

In his classic investigation, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (1975, 14), Dan Lortie wrote about the “egg crate school” in which teachers work individually and in isolation within their classrooms. This cellular nature of teaching does not give teachers opportunities to interact and learn from each other. What we have seen from the FINAL partnership is that, when given the opportunity, educators are enthusiastic and eager to exchange ideas with colleagues in the partnership, and then with colleagues back in their respective jurisdictions. Both Stiles and Baxter recount compelling narratives of their conversations with the teachers in their schools, as well as with other Alberta educators. As Stiles remarked, such communities are sustained by the retention of staff, who, by the length of their tenure in a school, contribute towards the building of family in the school.

These lively learning communities are not confined to teachers but extended to students. Baxter speaks of how he engages his students to discuss the features of a good school, and Stiles describes the interactions between her students and their Finnish peers. These learning communities are enhanced when the school leadership is open and receptive to teacher ideas and there are platforms for schoolwide and district- and provincewide conversations. Through these conversations, creative ideas are gleaned and best practices are shared. Baxter’s vignette of how a conversation with Calgary educators led his school to review its science curriculum is particularly significant because of the genuine desire to learn about the creative approaches in other schools. Likewise, Stiles’s example of the transnational online assessment project illustrates that physical distance does not deter or obstruct educators who are eager to learn from each other.

A significant observation is that these communities are driven by the purpose, need and vision of the local setting, rather than by externally imposed goals and targets. At Jasper Place High School, the creation of the Global Youth Assembly was based on a group of teachers seeking to create a richer learning experience through multiage learning. At Baxter’s school, the faculty’s decision to provide breakfast was more than meeting students’ physical needs; it was also a way for teachers and students to deepen their interaction and engagement with the school community. These kinds of school communities, driven by moral purpose and anchored in high levels of communication and exchange around that purpose, are more likely to be sustainable in the long term (Fullan 2004; Hargreaves and Fink 2005).

Integrating Networks of School Leaders Across International Boundaries

The educators participating in the Finland–Alberta partnership have gleaned deep insights about educational structures, teaching cultures and curriculum offerings as they visited each other’s jurisdictions. These site visits have provided rich learning for the teachers because they learned by experience and by watching their colleagues in action. For such conversations and learning to deepen, it is crucial that the learning continues back in their own jurisdictions. These teachers were active in sharing their experiences with their colleagues in school, as well as those in other schools. In addition to the international partnership, the Alberta teachers developed and intensified conversations at different scales: communication among principals, teachers and students across and within districts and jurisdictions. To this end, subsidiary and complementary nodes of communication have evolved from this international partnership. The emerging network is multilevel, integrated and nested. This is one feature of integrated networks, where deep learning cascades beyond the handful of participating teachers to reach colleagues within and across the two jurisdictions.

Baxter and Wescott connected with principals in their local area, and Stiles’s teachers collaborated in a virtual learning community with their Finnish counterparts to discuss assessment matters. Through these informal and formal networks, the teachers had access to a variety of expertise, such as drawing externally from the local business community and internally within their own school communities. The teachers also connected the students in their schools with those in the participating Finnish schools. Including students in the change process is significant because they are the focus of all educational change initiatives, yet frequently their voices and views are sidelined. In Baxter’s school, involving students in the conversation is an attempt to let them to play a more active role in the learning process, and an indication that they are part of the community. It is the distributive feature of educational leadership, one that includes all voices, especially those who typically have the least power over what is learned, how it is learned, and what school should be.

FINAL, as an integrating network, is a significant investment in human and social capital. As Stiles observed, a significant learning point about leadership gleaned from the Finnish system is that teachers, by the length of their stay in a school, provide the foundation for the building of bonds, links and ties within the school community and with the community in which it is located. The apparently conservative nature of Finnish society—with little mobility across schools in the course of one’s career—paradoxically enables educators to get to know their students and their families better and to provide a solid foundation for democratic participation and social cohesion. The Finnish emphasis on stability in terms of school staff develops and nurtures and strengthens ties and links with the community that students enter when they leave school. Stability in schooling then allows external relationships with businesses, government agencies and nonprofit groups to solidify rather than to change every few years. This is exemplified in the networks that Finnish teachers have established with entrepreneurs and industry, which has made their approach to vocational programs such a significant learning experience for the Alberta educators.

Conclusion

As an integrating network, FINAL is still in its nascent stages. This partnership is unique in that the movement provides a way for principals, teachers and students to experience and learn from another across educational jurisdictions to adapt practices with the collegial support of colleagues from quite different cultural, historical, linguistic and educational backgrounds. The approach is bottom-up and side-to-side, with leadership throughout exercised by the professionals themselves. Given the predominance of high-powered policy groups that set the international agenda and, in many ways, circumvent the professionals who actually are engaged with students on a daily basis, FINAL provides a promising and inspirational counter-narrative, with much value for others who seek not only high educational outcomes, but also humanistic educational processes as part of the path to a better future for all.

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Dennis Shirley is professor at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He is evaluating the partnership between Finland and Alberta, focused on the next stage in the development of their school systems.

Karen Lam is currently completing her doctoral studies at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College.