Koulumestari elementary school

An interesting visit today to Koulumestari school, a primary school in the suburb of Espoo. The school felt like it had a heart from the moment we walked in and the genuinely warm greeting at the door by Tina our host.

The school’s mission is to bring creativity and innovation to the school and other schools within their sphere of influence through technology education and the Innokas initiative.

The school itself is divided into teams and staff sign up depending on their interests and skills. The teams are ‘evaluation and curriculum, school events and staff well being, student well being’ and ‘technology education’.

The school felt like a genuine learning community with equal status between learners and teaching staff. There was also a skill based curriculum which struck a chord with what we are trying to achieve at MMHS and the ELLI dispositions.

The school environment felt genuinely conducive to learning with a light and airy feel and plenty of different types of space to meet the differing needs of the range of learners, a quarter of whom have special needs. There were all sorts of spaces that could be curtained off for learning in small groups or individually. But most classrooms looked very traditional.

There was talk of personalised learning and catering for different learning styles (nothing particularly new here but flipped classrooms interesting especially when videos made by the children themselves. Talk of audio, visual, kinaesthetic. Do these learning styles still stand up to scrutiny?

Mobile phones in learning – children planned together how they would use mobile phones inside and outside the classroom . School have a set of Lumia phones but some children prefer to use their own. They use them for a variety of things in their learning such as dictation, note making and podcasts. Refreshing that they are embracing mobile technology. New ways of using mobiles for learning are in theory uploaded to the school VLE/blog.

The school seemed to be genuinely on its own learning journey and the staff were also open minded and receptive.