Purpose: This country report aims to provide a view of the current state and recent developments of the school subject social studies in Finland. Approach: This report draws from research in social studies education that has been done in Finland in the last 20 years, and it also presents selected highlights from the national core curricula and the…

Positive education is the teaching of both traditional school skills and skills for enhancing well-being. This study examines teachers' (N = 72) experiences with training in positive education.Qualitative content analysis was used to provide an in-depth understanding of the experiences, and quantitative measures investigated teachers' well-being.…

The aim of this paper is to outline the teacher's role in classroom tandem. Classroom tandem is a student-centred model of language learning and instruction; there is a need for more knowledge about the teacher's role in a tandem classroom. Tandem learning, based on a social-interactional view of second language learning, requires that two…

There is provisional evidence that burnout may be contagious within professional communities via the crossover effect, referring to an inter-individual transmission of stress or strain. However, our understanding of effective means for tackling stressors is scarce. We tested a two-level path model to explore the interrelation between teachers'…

Teacher's gaze communicates consciously and unconsciously her pedagogical priorities to the students. By creating and responding to eye contact initiatives, people can communicate both status and affection. This research explores the frequency of teacher-student eye contacts and their connection to teachers' scaffolding intentions. The data…

This systematic review investigates the relevance of general pedagogical knowledge for successful teaching. It synthesises the empirical evidence of 10 769 teaching professionals and 853 452 students from primary to tertiary education in 21 countries. The meta-analysis of 20 quantitative studies revealed significant effects for teaching quality…

Efforts to reach gender equality in education in Finland have been extensive. Both teacher education and policy documents for schools have focused on gender equality and gender-neutral treatment of students. The aim of this study is to explore if and how these efforts are manifested in upper secondary school teachers' and study counsellors'…

Positive teacher attitudes are essential for success when children with special educational needs (SEN) are placed into mainstream classrooms. The present study surveyed teachers' attitudes towards inclusion by using a large national sample and Teachers' Attitudes towards Inclusion Scale (TAIS). A total of 1,764 Finnish basic-school teachers…

The study aims to gain a better understanding of the complexity of teacher learning by exploring the elements of teachers' sense of professional agency in the two primary contexts of teachers' work: the professional community and the classroom. Moreover, the relationship with agentic learning in these contexts is studied. A total of 2310 primary…

Investigating whether the effects of extrinsic and intrinsic factors on teachers' dissatisfaction with the teaching profession show variation between countries is crucial, especially given the significant impact on quality of instruction, which is also associated with student performance. In this respect, the main aim of this study is to reveal…

This study explored teachers' autonomy-supportive and controlling behaviors through video-taped observation in the classroom. Four lessons by two teachers from a secondary school in Finland were videotaped and analyzed using a rigorous coding protocol. It was found that teachers employed both autonomy-supportive and controlling teaching during the…

The aim of this research is to ask what kind of geography is taught in Finnish upper secondary schools and whether this knowledge is powerful knowledge. This is achieved by analysing 11 in-service geography teachers' concept maps and in-depth interviews with qualitative data analysis. The results indicate the dominance of three terms: spatiality,…

Teachers' support concerning learners' metacognitive awareness (MA) is crucial in learning. Previous research has focused mainly on students' MA. Therefore, this study describes how subject teachers and special teachers (N = 1,045) perceive how they support learners' MA in general education and in vocational education and training. The main…

This paper examines and reports on ways of promoting teaching presence in foreign language online learning environments in Finland and Spain. 'Teaching presence' refers to all the tools and resources teachers use during online courses to deliver teaching, guidance and feedback, or situations in which they are present for their students. A…

To examine different approaches to teacher autonomy in nation-states, three countries were selected for a comparative study: Estonia, Finland and Germany. The emphasis of the study lies on the subjective perceptions of upper secondary school teachers (n = 33 semi-structured interviews) regarding their curricular autonomy and experiences of being…