NEWS
Education is under an extensive transformation in Finland. The new Finnish national core curricula was published in December 2014 and will be officially implemented into schools nation-wide beginning in the Fall of 2016. It is time to put theory into practice, but what does this mean on a school level? How will it change the way we educate in Finland? What will the role of the student or the teacher be? How will the new curriculum respond to the issues we face in our schools daily? What does it mean to educate cross-curricular phenomenon based learning? These are some of the many questions HundrED will strive to answer.
A bold step forward - together
HundrED was established in the Fall of 2015 followed by an official ceremony in December at the Maxim theatre in Helsinki. It was clear from the start that something new and inspirational was being created. The timing and the need for an organization like HundrED felt right.
From the beginning, the main concep of HundrED has been ‘creating together.’ We firmly believe that by sharing educational know-how and ideas as well as boldly trialing these ideas, together we can globally achieve something that has never been seen before in education. It’s time to reach out and work towards the goal of spreading and developing excellent ideas.
We challenged all of Finland to share their ideas in developing education. The call for submissions began in December 2015 and the first round ended in April 2016. This meant that any agent from schools to private parties, municipalities and other could apply to take part in HundrED’s Finnish 100 experiments. We received over 500 submissions, each interesting and unique. However, not all experiments were meant to be brand new - excellent existing practices that should be shared with the world have also been embraced.
In assessing the submitted 500, we had to assemble an advisory board of Finnish education specialists who would be evaluating the scalability, community aspect and pedagogy of the experiments. The advisory board met throughout the Spring of 2016 to make their final selection in April.
What will be happening with the experiments in the Fall of 2016?
On April 27th seventy-five Finnish experiments were selected for trialing throughout the 2016-2017 school year across Finland. Each experiment will be updating news in real time on the progression of the trialings. This news can be found on their project pages in the form of video, photos and blog texts. The participants challenged themselves to trial new educational ideas that are based on the country’s new core curricula and its renewed broad-based competencies to create learning tools for teachers and students in preparing them for the future workforce.
.
HundrED emphasises the importance of research - a validation process will follow the trialing of each experiment in partnership with the University of Jyväskylä. The goals we look to achieve may be found on each experiment’s own project page.
Currently HundrED consists of 170 schools and ninety-eight executive members who will be carrying out the seventy-five experiments.
75 chosen - a remaining 25 yet to be selected
The arduous process in selecting the Finnish 100 has brought about eye-opening discourse on the future of education. Instead of proceeding in finding 100 schools for HundrED, we began to focus on 100 themes that develop education. This resulted in selecting seventy-five experiments in the Spring of 2016 and leaving the remaining twenty-five for further consideration. All submissions for the remaining experiments are respectively taken into account. We encourage applicants to be innovative and bold with their ideas. The submission form will be active until October 15th this year and the final selection will be made in the beginning of December.
The current seventy-five experiments will be trialed in selected schools across Finland this Fall and the process of each experiment may be followed by visiting our website https://hundred.fi/experiments.
Together we can make Finnish education sustainable for the next 100 years to come.
We welcome you to follow our journey in HundrED!