Week 11 14/03/11 – 21/03/11

Just when I thought spring was coming to Turku it starts snowing again.  It looks like there will be snow until the mid April.  Now it’s clear to see why Finland is so good at winter sports, from mid November to mid April there is snow.  In Northern Ireland we had two weeks of snow and the country couldn’t cope.

This week I had two guest speakers in a few of my lectures and the whole dynamic and atmosphere was different.  I know we have guest speakers at Stranmillis but here it is different as the Finnish lectures try to create an atmosphere that is friendly and relaxed but on occasion they often just create a boring lecture.  So when a different speaker takes a lesson and uses some active participation we get excited.  The active learning given here is used less frequently than back in Stranmillis and I feel that the students learning often suffers from this and getting motivated for these classes can be difficult.  This mean that there is more independent study involved however we need to observe information that we do not cover in class where as in Stranmillis we cover extra on what we have learnt and rarely id it something completely new.

The teaching placement here is radically different than back in Stranmillis.  We need to fit our lessons and observations around lectures, which is very difficult as every week classes are moved around, cancelled or added to my timetable.  This is probably the thing I dislike the most as the semester is split up into two terms of January and February then March and April although the official end date of the term is the 27^th of May, however in May there are very few classes and schools are moving to the end of their year.  The six or seven weeks intense placement at Stranmillis works better, I feel, because it is difficult to prepare lesson plans, resources and observations reports at the same time as writing an essay, a learning diary and any other independent study.