Phenomenon-based learning is a Finnish pedagogy born of the new 2016 curriculum which Grunwell saw in action during a sabbatical spent in Finland investigating successful student-led learning ideas, thanks to a grant from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. Grunwell considers the rationale behind a pedagogy which allows students the freedom to plan and structure their own learning and which focuses on developing students’ skills, rather than the traditional route of imparting knowledge which students must memorise.
The integration of phenomenon-based learning into the Finnish curriculum is a considered response from the Finnish government to the needs of the contemporary workplace in a rapidly changing world. The Finns believe that school must reflect the demands of the workplace by giving children ample scope to develop the skills that they will need in later life: the ability to think independently, to problem-solve and to innovate. But how could this work in the UK?
About twenty 11 to 12-year-olds roam the room and spill into the corridor, brandishing paintbrushes, scribbling notes, sticking coloured paper to the walls and talking loudly to each other. The energy in the room is infectious, but it’s not clear what’s going on. One boy reattempts bottle flipping for the twenty-second time (thank you YouTube), but no one bothers him about it. It looks like chaos. It’s Ofsted-outstandingly chaotic, but that’s certainly not a problem.
I’m in a classroom in Tampere, Finland, about two hours’ drive north of Helsinki, and the teacher is not interested in her classroom looking anything like a classroom in the traditional sense of the word. In fact, it’s supposed to look as unlike school as possible, school-free even. All the desks are pushed against the walls, chairs are stacked away and children are grouped around the room working on, well, it’s hard to determine the subject. There is a rainbow of paints, pens, books and papers strewn around the place and several heads are bent over tablets or laptops. If you speak to the class teacher, the subject these students are studying doesn’t actually seem to matter all that much. The subject isn’t the point of this particular pedagogy: phenomenon-based learning. Yes, these students are in the early stages of their projects on a certain topic (Forests), but, according to their teacher, the knowledge that they gain during this project will be a happy by-product of the essential skills that they develop through working together to produce a final product of their own design.
In fact, the teacher hasn’t planned anything for her class in terms of the subject content and the headteacher is well aware of this. She’s certainly planned how to guide them, how to teach them the necessary skills integral to planning and delivering an independent project and she’s arranged methods to track their progress, but she hasn’t prepared the lesson content in terms of conventionally-structured activities: questions and answers, worksheets and essay questions.
Formally introduced by the revised Finnish curriculum (2016), phenomenon-based learning promotes student-centred, authentic learning contexts to motivate student engagement in the learning process. Teachers enable this through cross-curricular, problem-based learning grounded in real life topics, ideas and issues (or phenomena). This pedagogy recognises that school is preparing students for jobs that do not currently exist; for using technologies that haven’t been invented; for solving problems that we don’t yet know are problems, and, in so doing, phenomenon-based learning shifts emphasis from “what students learn”, to “how students learn”. Rather than subject-based learning, reliance on textbooks or teaching particular units of information prescribed by the curriculum or syllabus, phenomenon-based learning seeks to create authentic learning contexts based on real-work problems or phenomena in a cross-curricular context.