Sanni Pöysä

A home-school partnership refers to the shared responsibility between home and school, whereby families and school staff work together to support student learning (Epstein, 2018; Goodall & Montgome...

Since the 1990s, educational policies have emphasized the importance of parental involvement in their offspring’s schooling. Home-school collaboration is positively associated with students' academic achievement, well-being and school satisfaction. The ideal home-school partnership is based on shared expertise, mutual respect, trust and dialogicity. However, not all parents have equal opportunities to participate in home-school collaboration. Practices often overlook family diversity and power dynamics, marginalizing parents' voices. This study explores parents' perspectives on home-school partnership ideals and related power dynamics, using responses from 921 parents as part of the larger survey. Our approach emphasizes the discursive nature of home-school partnership and highlights how dominant discourses shape social realities and practices in both home and school contexts. The results reveal diverse and often tense views among parents. Despite the discourse of partnership, parental involvement is often limited to teacher-parent discussions, event organization, and receiving information. Some parents express a desire to be more actively involved in developing school culture. Taking parents’ experiences into account is essential for planning effective home-school cooperation in both educational policy and practice.

Teachers experience various demands in their job, and teachers’ well-being has become a concern. However, less is known about how teachers’ positive and negative aspects of teachers’ occupational well-being are related to their quality of interactions with students, at the lower primary school classrooms. This study explored the relation between teachers’ occupational well-being and teacher–student interactions in primary school classrooms in Finland. 49 Grade 2 teachers rated their work engagement and burnout, and quality of teacher–student interactions was rated by trained coders using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS K-3) based on video-recorded lessons. Results of structural equation modelling showed that teachers with higher levels of work engagement showed higher-quality emotional support and instructional support, while teachers with higher levels of burnout potentially evidenced lower-quality instructional support. It is suggested that more attention should be paid to teachers’ positive aspects of occupational well-being in teacher education programs and schools.

Background: Teachers' emotions while teaching are associated to how they teach. Prior research has evidenced such associations mostly based on teacher or student ratings of different teaching behaviours. Aims: This study examined the extent to which teachers' self‐rated lesson‐specific positive and negative emotions are associated with the observed quality of teacher–student interactions in terms of emotional support, classroom organization and instructional support as well as students' behavioural engagement in the same lesson. Sample: The participants comprised 84 subject teachers (76.2% female) and 907 students (15–16 years old; 50.1% female) from 26 Finnish lower secondary schools. Methods: The data consisted of video‐recordings from a total of 282 lessons (M = 3.36 lessons/teacher). The quality of teacher–student interactions and students' behavioural engagement was assessed using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System–Secondary (CLASS‐S) observational instrument. Data regarding teachers' positive and negative emotions were collected at the end of each video‐recorded lesson using the In Situations Teacher (InSitu‐T) Instrument. The collected data were analysed using cross‐classified two‐level modelling. Results and Conclusions: The findings revealed that teachers' positive and negative emotions were positively and negatively associated, respectively, with the observed quality of teacher–student interactions in terms of emotional support and classroom organization but not instructional support. The results provide evidence of the associations between teachers' emotions and students' observed behavioural engagement. The findings complement the literature by highlighting the importance of observational data, along with teacher and student ratings.

The present study examined the profiles of parental perceptions of their child’s school adjustment in terms of learning loss and school well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland. Furthermore, the extent to which the profiles differed with respect to the different children and their family characteristics, as well as their parents’ stress about their child’s schooling, were examined. Parents (N = 26,313) completed a questionnaire in spring 2021 concerning parental stress and their children’s schooling. The five-profile solution was identified using latent profile analysis: (1) slightly-higher-than-average-school-adjustment (n = 8198, 31.2%); (2) high-school-adjustment (n = 3017, 11.5%); (3) slightly-lower-than-average-school-adjustment (n = 5025, 19.1%); (4) low-school-adjustment (n = 6777, 25.7%); and (5) mixed-school-adjustment (n = 3296, 12.5%). The low-school-adjustment profile was overrepresented among parents of boys, older children, and children with special education needs as well as among parents with lower education levels, higher numbers of children, and in single-parent households. In addition, the results showed that parental stress about their child’s schooling was associated with their perceptions of their child’s school adjustment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, the results demonstrate that parents’ views of their children’s school adjustment varied widely during the COVID-19 pandemic. At schools, particular attention should be given to at-risk families (e.g., families with low education levels and children with special education needs) in which children may be prone to learning loss and low well-being due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tässä tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan alakouluikäisten oppilaiden kokemuksia etäopetuksesta koronapandemian alussa keväällä 2020. Tutkimuksen aineistona käytettiin 46 neljäsluokkalaisen oppilaan teemahaastatteluista tehtyjä litteraatteja. Osallistujien valinnassa hyödynnettiin luokanopettajien tekemiä arvioita oppilaiden psykososiaalisesta hyvinvoinnista. Oppilaiden teemahaastattelut analysoitiin temaattisen analyysin avulla. Tulokset osoittivat, että oppilaat nostivat esille niin myönteisiä kuin kielteisiä etäopetuskokemuksia. Myönteisinä kokemuksina mainittiin esimerkiksi vapaus aikatauluttaa ja suunnitella opiskelua sekä etäopiskelun rentous. Kielteisenä koettiin sosiaalisten kontaktien puute ja oppimiseen liittyvät vaikeudet. Useimmat oppilaat toivoivat lisäksi, että etäopetusta ei jatkossa enää tulisi. Samalla kuitenkin huomattava osa oppilaista suhtautui neutraalisti mahdolliseen etäopetuksen toistumiseen tulevaisuudessa, ja pieni osa oppilaista valitsisi jatkossakin etäopetuksen lähiopetuksen sijaan. Tulokset antoivat viitteitä siitä, että psykososiaalinen hyvinvointi heijastui jossain määrin oppilaiden kokemuksiin etäopetuksesta. Opetuksen järjestämisessä on näin ollen tärkeää huomioida lasten ja nuorten omat kokemukset opetuksesta ja toimivista opetusjärjestelyistä, jotta pystytään paremmin vastaamaan heidän yksilöllisiin tarpeisiinsa.

This study examined teachers’ experiences of occupational stress in Finland and Estonia during the COVID-19 lockdown, and whether their stress would be related to their experiences of support from colleagues and leaders. The participants were total of 1,319 teachers that were teaching grades 1–6 in spring 2020. The data were analyzed using regression analyses with interaction terms. The results showed that the teachers in Finland and Estonia experienced stress during the lockdown, and that teachers’ stress was higher in the Finnish sample than in the Estonian sample. The findings of this study suggest that support gained from colleagues or leaders seems to be important when aiming to reduce teachers’ occupational stress in both countries.