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It’s October and the days in Estonia are growing darker, which means that the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival is just around the corner. A major cultural event and one of the largest film festivals in Northern Europe, it will run for two and a half weeks starting in November. In the offices of the festival, abbreviated as PÖFF in Estonian, on the third floor of a converted factory building in Tallinn’s Telliskivi neighborhood, its organizers are working each day industriously.
One of them, Mikk Granström, PÖFF’s head of administration, is there. But he has something else on his mind: how to improve the way learning strategies are taught in Estonian schools.
Granström, in addition to being a film festival organizer, is also a junior research fellow in Talllinn University‘s School of Educational Sciences. In September, he defended his doctoral thesis, called, “Teachers’ and Students’ Knowledge of Learning Strategies and How Teachers’ Teach Learning Strategies in the Classroom.” It was the culmination of years of research. Granström’s doctoral thesis was supervised by Tallinn University researchers Eve Kikas and Eve Eisenschmidt. Its opponents were Pirko Tõugu, an associate professor at the University of Tartu, as well as Markku Hannula, a professor of education at the University of Helsinki.
For the ever busy Granström, defending his thesis was like crossing the finishing line after a demanding race. “It’s like a marathon,” he says. “As you run, you realize it’s just a competition against yourself. You don’t care how long it takes and you don’t think about the destination.”
Granström says he was motivated to complete his doctoral studies because he wanted to outdo himself, and to overcome each challenge. “I always wanted to see if I could make it to the next level,” says Granström. “A very important thing was that I found a theme that interested me.”
While running film festivals and getting a PhD in educational sciences might not appear obviously linked, they were for Granström. He got involved with PÖFF first, after running a successful film festival at his high school in Tallinn and getting an invitation for the organizers. Given his involvement, he was also invited to teach film, and it was here that educational sciences entered the picture. “I understood that I didn’t have any experience in teaching,” Granström recalls. “I didn’t know how teaching works, so I went to a seminar on teaching.”
That seminar, he notes, was the first in a series of steps that would lead to him getting a PhD.
“The topic just really interested me, how people learn, how learning works,” recalls Granström. “When you find a subject that interests you, you are ready to outdo yourself. Your interest won’t ever disappear,” he says.
Of mice and rockets, and trousers
Relaying effective learning strategies to teachers as well as students is important, says Granström, not only because it will improve students’ performance, but also their well being. But based on his own research, while teachers acquire learning strategies as part of their education, they don’t often pass these strategies on to their pupils, which means students are on their own. This can have negative consequences, not only in academic performance, but in life in general.
“If a student goes to school and we don’t teach them how to learn, what happens?” Granström asks. “They lose interest, they have no motivation, and they don’t want to go to school. Then the learning material only gets more complex and they can’t do mathematics. It only gets worse.”
There is also an urgency to Granström’s research, and that is a shift in society toward lifetime learning, which means that people will not only use learning strategies at school, but throughout their lives, whenever they acquire new skills. But this can be achieved with the right strategies.
One final factor influencing his work is a shift to remote learning, which took place in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Granström was trying to do his research. Schools moved to online learning and students had to adjust their learning strategies in the midst of this shift.
For Granström, this only reinforced the importance of knowing learning strategies. But there is hope. One sentence that Granström says continues to inspire him was written by Aaro Toomela, a visiting professor in the University of Tartu‘s department of special education. The sentence goes, “The mouse put on trousers, jumped in a rocket and flew to the center of the Earth.”
“The funniest thing is that you can imagine it,” says Granström. “This is an irrational sentence, but it gets your attention immediately. So learning doesn’t have to be boring,” Granström says. “It doesn’t have to involve just cramming and cramming.”
Learning to learn
For his doctoral thesis, Granström did field work at schools in Tallinn, Tartu, and in other parts of Estonia to determine what learning methods were being used in Estonian schools. In his thesis, Granström noted that different learning strategies support superficial or surface learning, as well as deep learning. Those that support the latter help learners remember what they have learned over a longer period of time, resulting in permanent memory retention, while surface learning promotes short-term retention and isn’t always linked to what has been previously learned.
Previous studies of Estonian schools found that students tend to favor learning strategies that support surface learning rather than deep learning, and that students overall don’t know much about learning strategies. However, this information had been obtained by questionnaires, which Granström tried to improve on by doing classroom observations, and using qualitative and quantitative data.
He found that Estonian teachers have a good grasp of learning strategies, and prefer those that support deep learning. Students, as had been previously reported, preferred strategies that favored surface learning, in part because their scores on examinations were seen as a priority.
And while teachers were found to be knowledgeable of learning strategies, students were not. One reason for this might be the fact that teachers are overloaded with teaching the curricula, making it difficult for them to find time to teach different learning strategies to their students.
To remedy this, Granström suggested that teachers’ knowledge of learning strategies should be assessed in greater depth. One way to achieve this could be through extended class observations, as well as providing additional workshops to ensure that learning strategies are taught in the classroom. This would necessitate the creation of additional materials for teachers around learning strategies.
“A lot of things in Estonia are fine,” said Granström. “But we need to stress to teachers that they also need to teach students how to learn.”
Learning, he noted, happens when students actively participate in the learning process, and don’t just sit and absorb information from a lecture. “You don’t just have to use these old methods, like teaching from slides,” says Granström. “The person who learns the most from those methods is the teacher, but not the student.”
He noted that his findings could be valuable in other academic settings. “This is not an island,” said Granström. “Our results and methods could be used outside Estonia and I hope they will.”
Future opportunities
Completing his doctoral research while helping to run an annual film festival hasn’t been easy for Granström, but he says it will inform all of his activities going forward. “PÖFF itself is a wild challenge,” Granström says, “so naturally it was difficult to put these two things together.”
He notes that he will also try to implement the findings from his PhD in his day job at PÖFF, where he organizes film-related workshops. “There are a lot of educational projects involved in the program, and there are a lot of opportunities for me to use my knowledge,” Granström says.
The link between his two passions is thus very strong. “In these workshops there is a need to learn,” says Granström, “and to be more effective.”
Read Mikk Granström’s doctoral thesis from HERE! And get to know all the best tactics about learning to learn!
This article is written by Justin Petrone. This article was funded by the European Regional Development Fund through Estonian Research Council.
If this lesson on education has sharpened your pencil, don’t drop out just yet – flip to our next article and read more about how Pankaj Chejara developed a machine learning model to assess collaboration quality in classrooms!
