A Blueprint for Transformational Change

Reimagining Schools Through Finnish Lessons and Liberating Structures

In the face of mounting challenges in education—ranging from student disengagement to educator burnout and institutional inertia—calls to radically reimagine how we design and experience schooling have grown louder. Reform efforts, however, often falter under the weight of top-down mandates, fragmented initiatives, and the absence of a coherent, people-centered strategy. A promising way forward lies in the integration of two powerful yet underutilized frameworks: the systemic insights of Finnish Lessons by Pasi Sahlberg and the participatory dynamics of Liberating Structures, a repertoire of facilitation techniques designed to unlock collective intelligence.

By combining the Finnish model’s emphasis on trust, equity, professionalism, and collaboration with the creative engagement strategies of Liberating Structures, educators and reformers can co-create learning environments that are not only more effective but also more humane, democratic, and future-ready.

The Finnish Paradigm: Lessons in Equity, Trust, and Teacher Autonomy

Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish Lessons presents a compelling narrative of Finland’s educational transformation from mediocrity to global admiration. Notably, this transformation did not rely on the mechanisms commonly touted in other high-performing systems—standardized testing, school choice, or punitive accountability. Instead, Finland pursued a deeply humanistic and systemic path rooted in trust, equity, and a commitment to professionalizing teaching.

Key insights from Finnish Lessons include:

• Equity over competition: Finland's education system prioritizes closing achievement gaps over pushing top performers further ahead. Resources are directed where they are needed most, ensuring all students have access to high-quality education regardless of socio-economic status.

• Teacher professionalism and autonomy: Teachers in Finland are highly educated, deeply respected, and granted considerable autonomy in curriculum design and pedagogy. Instead of being micromanaged, they are treated as co-creators of knowledge and learning culture.

• Less is more: Finland reduced instructional hours and standardized testing, favoring deep learning, play, and creativity over content overload.

• Trust-based accountability: The Finnish model rejects rigid inspection regimes in favor of peer collaboration, school-level innovation, and a culture of intrinsic motivation.

• Whole-child development: Education in Finland is seen as a vehicle for nurturing well-rounded human beings—not just for preparing labor market participants.

These principles challenge dominant education reform narratives that treat schools like factories and learning like a transaction. They invite us to design for flourishing, not merely performance.

Liberating Structures: Participation as Innovation

While Finnish Lessons provides a vision of what a successful, human-centered education system can look like, Liberating Structures offers a toolkit for making that vision actionable—one interaction, classroom, or staff meeting at a time. Developed by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, Liberating Structures are 33+ microstructures that reimagine how people work and learn together. Unlike conventional formats (e.g., presentations, managed discussions), they democratize participation, distribute leadership, and encourage bottom-up innovation.

Each structure is grounded in a set of design elements: a clear purpose, thoughtful space configuration, simple time constraints, and sequencing of steps that ensure everyone has a voice. Examples include:

• 1-2-4-All: Allows every participant to generate ideas and build on others' input, moving from individual reflection to group consensus.

• TRIZ: Encourages groups to identify and eliminate counterproductive behaviors by imagining how to actively achieve the opposite of their goals.

• Appreciative Interviews: Reveals what works well by having participants share and learn from their positive deviance—successful practices in challenging situations.

• Ecocycle Planning: Visualizes the full life cycle of initiatives (from birth to destruction), helping teams identify what's stuck, what needs creative destruction, and where renewal is needed.

These tools do more than improve meetings—they rewire relationships. They create conditions where students, teachers, leaders, and families can co-design, critique, and rebuild systems that serve them better.

Integration in Practice: Finnish Lessons Meets Liberating Structures

When integrated, Finnish Lessons and Liberating Structures can serve as both the blueprint and the building tools for reimagining schools. Below are several areas where their synergy can be transformative.

1. Professional Learning Communities as Engines of Change

Finnish education thrives on peer collaboration, lesson study, and a culture of shared inquiry. In most American and Canadian schools, PLCs often devolve into compliance rituals or data dives focused on test scores. By embedding Liberating Structures into PLCs—using structures like What, So What, Now What?, 15% Solutions, and Discovery and Action Dialogue—educators can breathe new life into collaboration. These tools enable teachers to reflect authentically, uncover hidden expertise, and develop change from the ground up.

This honors the Finnish ideal of trust and autonomy while providing concrete scaffolding for teacher-led innovation.

2. Student Voice and Agency in School Design

Finnish schools are known for respecting students’ developmental needs and promoting autonomy. However, the model stops short of widespread co-design with students. Here, Liberating Structures can extend the Finnish model by engaging students as co-creators of their learning environment.

Structures like Celebrity Interview and Wise Crowds can be used in classrooms and student forums to elicit insights about what helps or hinders engagement. TRIZ could help students identify the hidden “design flaws” in school systems that undermine curiosity and belonging.

By building routines that allow students to shape their learning environment, schools move closer to fostering real learner identity, one of the most critical factors in long-term success.

3. Reforming Curriculum and Assessment with Collective Intelligence

Finland’s shift away from standardized testing toward formative, teacher-designed assessment is a bold statement of trust. But how do we practically transition toward such models in systems deeply entangled in high-stakes testing?

One answer lies in bringing educators, families, and even students into design conversations using Liberating Structures. Ecocycle Planning can help districts and schools inventory current assessment practices and identify those that no longer serve their purpose. Appreciative Interviews and User Experience Fishbowl can reveal what types of assessments genuinely support learning.

This collective redesign effort builds buy-in and clarity, making implementation smoother and more contextually relevant.

4. Cultural Transformation and Equity

Equity is central to the Finnish model, yet many schools struggle to translate equity ideals into daily practice. Liberating Structures make equity actionable by democratizing who speaks, who decides, and who learns. When used systematically, they elevate marginalized voices, shift power dynamics, and increase transparency.

Imagine a school leadership team using Heard Seen Respected with families from historically underserved communities. Or a district equity initiative built around Panarchy to map the multiple levels of influence—from classroom to policy—that sustain inequity.

Combined with Finland’s systemic emphasis on fairness, these practices create not just equal access, but equitable influence.

5. Creating Space for Experimentation and Reflection

Finally, one of Finland’s most striking features is the space it gives schools and educators to reflect, experiment, and iterate. This stands in stark contrast to the frenetic, compliance-driven tempo in many other systems.

Liberating Structures normalize small, safe-to-fail experiments through structures like 15% Solutions and Design Storyboards. They help shift a culture from “pilot paralysis” to ongoing learning loops. When teachers regularly use these tools to refine practice, innovation becomes part of the daily rhythm.

Relevance to Reimagination Initiatives

Many initiatives today seek to “reimagine” education: competency-based learning, community schools, trauma-informed pedagogy, and deeper learning networks. However, these efforts often stall for two reasons: (1) they struggle to translate vision into action, and (2) they fail to engage the system’s human complexity.

The integrated framework of Finnish Lessons and Liberating Structures offers a remedy.

• It provides a coherent vision (equity, trust, professionalism, whole-child focus).

• It equips practitioners with microstructures for systemic participation and adaptation.

• It embraces complexity by acknowledging that schools are living systems—not machines to be optimized, but communities to be cultivated.

Most importantly, this integration doesn’t demand huge new investments. It requires a shift in posture—from control to curiosity, from mandates to co-creation.

Conclusion: Designing with, not for, the Future

In reimagining schools, we must stop looking for silver bullets or top-down blueprints. The Finnish model shows us what’s possible when we invest in trust, professionalism, and equity. Liberating Structures show us how to do it—by changing the way we work, one conversation at a time.

Together, they form a compelling invitation: to build schools that are not merely efficient, but deeply human. To design not for students and teachers—but with them.

This is not just a method. It is a movement. And the future of learning depends on it.