Upper secondary school in Finland

M.Sc. Lauri Hellsten (      laurihellsten)

math and physics teacher (13 years in the profession)

  • Introduction
  • Teaching in Finland
  • STEM examples from the classroom

 

  • About 700 student upper secondary school
    • Located in Espoo next to the Kera train station.
    • Students apply with 7,8 grade point average
  • Emphasises entrepreneurship, global citizenship, sustainable development and social skills for the future.
  • LUMA (STEM) developer school
  • Lots of international projects (CERN course, Model UN course, German history course, Shanghai-exchange)
    • Students learn to understand cultural differences and they learn valuable lessons on how to live in a globalised world.
  • Open minded and innovative teachers developing new teaching methods

About Espoon yhteislyseo

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 1. Upper Secondary Schools Act

 2. National core curriculum

  • 300 pages altogether

  • 13 pages math curriculum

  • 5 pages physics curriculum

 3. Local curriculum (mostly same as #2)

 4. Matriculation exam

 

 

What guides the teacher?

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Keypoints from the curriculum 

 

  • Focus on assessments for learning.
    • Emphasis on the formative assessment.
  • Student must show diverse knowledge on the contents and goals of a course for the courses summative assesment.
  • Specific ICT skills as goals in STEM-courses
    • Digital matriculation exam 
  • Use of programs (GeoGebra, LoggerPro, etc.) in STEM-courses.
  • New type of problems involving large scales of different type of digital materials (real life data, videos, simulations, etc.) that couldn't be done in the paper exam.

Upper secondary school in Finland

1. semester

2. semester

3. semester

1. period

2. period

3. period

4. period

5. period

min. 150 credits and usually 3 years 

usually 6 + 1 weeks

5 - 7 courses,

1 course = 3 x 75 min per week = 2 credits

Matriculation exam at the end, min. 5 exams

Digital matriculation exam

The digital exam system (abitti.fi)

Server

Router

Students laptop, booted from an USB-stick

Name Name
Casio ClassPad Manager* wxMaxima*
Dia Texas Instruments TI-Nspire CAS*
GeoGebra 5* ja 6* SpeedCrunch
GIMP Pinta
GNOME- Okular
Inkscape MarvinSketch
KCalc Mousepad
LibreOffice LoggerPro*
MAOL formula tables

All programs in the Abitti system

Lauri's current timetable

Collaboration with LUMA centre

  • Students visit Fotoni and Gadolin laboratories in the University of Helsinki.
  • Visitors from the University of Helsinki to our courses.
  • Planning and trying out new teaching methods and materials (e.g. PIRE-project)
  • Planning new projects with the LUMA centre (e.g. STEM circus-course).

STEM circus -course

  • Students visit local kindergarden and organize a "STEM circus".
  • Students show safe scientific demonstrations to the kids that they plan themselves with the teacher.
  • Students need to figure how to explain these demonstrations to kids.

CERN-course

  • Every second year we organize a CERN-course.
  • The course includes a three day visit to CERN for 10-12 of our students.
  • On-going project that many Finnish upper secondary schools take part of.

Let me hack it! -course

  • Let me hack it! -course is an programming course, where students learned to program with arduino.
  • Was held for the first time during the covid pandemic.

STEM workshop

  • Weekly open workshop for the students.
  • Students can come and go as they please.
  • Always a teacher present.
  • Free cookies, tea and coffee

Use of ICT in STEM

  • Hands-on-approach to learning.
  • Students use digital software to measure different phenomens and experiments.
  • Digital textbook with authentic data, simulations and real-time feedback.

Thank you!

Lauri Hellsten

lauri.k.hellsten@gmail.com

Upper secondary school / EYL

By Opetus.tv

Upper secondary school / EYL

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