There was less of a tour at this school. We did have a good opportunity to talk with teachers and students though and that was valuable. I didn't realize we would spend that much time however and felt a little unprepared but it worked out. It was nice to hear about things from a student perspective. I asked them what they thought was the secret to the PISA results and they stated that the test just seemed easy. They felt that since they were not always pressured  to take big tests like this they did not feel stressed and that perhaps that helped as well. Students in Finland do not have the school social connection that American students do. They enjoy being there with their friends but they go to school to learn and seem to be less distracted at school than many American students are. Being the minority language I asked if there was any stigma of going to the only Swedish speaking school. They told me that they didn't feel there was. After school they all just hung out the same. They did feel that speaking Swedish gave them an advantage though as far as being able to communicate in businesses.

Some interesting facts about the schools that we learned- the custodians and support staff are hired by the municipality and not the school. The food and school site as well are paid for by the municipality. We did not that the students were taught not to waste food and we saw that they measured the food waste and posted the amount. At my school we force students to take a certain amount of food whether they want it or not and we have a huge amount of waste. It seems almost criminal at the amount of food that id thrown away daily and it only teaches the students not to value the food they are given. Students in high school also have to buy their own books. Since upper secondary school is not mandated supplies are no longer provided by the school. We were told that at the university level there was strong library support so books could be borrowed. I didn’t hear for sure if the high schools had the same kind of arrangements.

Earlier I had mentioned that there was not a big push on technology. We had a speaker at the high school who told us of several projects that are being tracked by the ministry of education and studied for “best practices”. The use of technology was largely involved in many of these projects with the vision that Information Communications Technology (ICT) is a resource that puts “the whole world within the student’s reach.” Apparently ICT is much larger than my initial impression.