The Alberta Teachers’ Association

As Alberta’s K–12 education sector pursues “informed transformation” sparked by the government’s Inspiring Action initiative, the Finland–Alberta partnership continues to explore innovative approaches to learning in Alberta’s schools.

The international partnership, which involves the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA), Finnish officials and high schools in Alberta and Finland, was initiated last year by the ATA and endorsed by the education ministries of Alberta and Finland. The partnership was launched in Edmonton in March 2011 at the symposium “Educational Futures—International Perspectives on Innovation from the Inside Out.”

A joint Alberta–Finland steering committee is coordinating the partnership’s work. A research team will be led by Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves, coauthors of The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change, and Stephen Murgatroyd, of Innovation Expedition. A key principle of the research noted by Murgatroyd is that “it is the school not the system that will be the locus of control for advancing the goal of informed transformation.” Based on this principle, the partnership will support the transformation and personalization of learning by focusing on three levels of leadership: student leadership, teacher leader development and principal leadership.

Plans are in place for an ­exchange of teachers, principals and students in the current school year. Five Alberta schools—­Centennial, Grande Prairie Composite, Crowsnest Consolidated, McNally and Jasper Place—and seven Finnish high schools—Kitee, Seinajoki, Turku ­Suomailainen, Vasa Oviningsskola, Valkeakoski upper secondaries and Turku and Kainuu vocational institutes—will participate in the exchange.

Jean Stiles, principal of Jasper Place High School, said, “The excitement we share among the Alberta schools is about the common commitment to leadership—for students, teachers, administrators and at the system level. What we share with the Finns is that in this rapidly changing world, transformation is not something we want done to us.”

The ATA is working with Finnish officials on getting the necessary conditions and policies in place. ATA President Carol Henderson noted, “The more we begin to understand the successes in both our jurisdictions, the more I realize that the partnership is not just about Alberta or Finland. We need to see the work of the schools in the partnership as part of a broader effort to offer an alternative to current global education-reform movements.”

Ironically, the Finns are committed to many policies that Alberta abandoned in the early 1990s, when cuts to education funding resulted in declining support for basic education and early learning and a deterioration of conditions of teaching practice.

The lessons the Alberta and Finnish educators are learning from each other remind us that “transformation is not something to be found in a killer app,” remarked a Finnish teacher. The reality is that both our jurisdictions have at times been distracted from the real purpose of public education—developing the full potential of all our students, not just those destined for academic studies. For example, the Alberta principals in the partnership ­observed that although the province has specialized programs, such as International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement for high-performing secondary students, it provides fewer specialized supports for the majority of students who don’t head to university. Matt Christenson, an exchange participant and principal of Calgary’s Centennial High School, said, “It is good to see in Finland that 50 per cent of young people see the vocational trades as a preferred route to school success—a stark contrast to here in Alberta, where university-track studies are subtly branded as the only game in town.”

This fall, the project will be evaluated by the international research team, whose role over the next three years is to ensure the partnership does not become another bureaucratic mission—what the Finns call “educational tourism,” where people not connected directly to classrooms look for short-term gimmicks to impose on schools. “Across the world there are already far too many people lined up outside school classrooms telling teachers what to do,” said Dennis Shirley. “The Alberta–Finland partnership is transformational in that it is about teachers themselves developing school reform in Alberta’s K–12 system from the inside out.”