Etu-Töölö Upper Secondary School

OUR SCHOOL

Etu-Töölö Upper Secondary School is a non-graded upper secondary school in central Helsinki, the capital of Finland. We are an academic-oriented school with about 600 students aged 16-19 with a focus on entrepreneurship and cultural knowledge. We emphasize the active role of the students in acquiring, processing and applying information because we believe that one of our most important objectives is to make our students form a structured view of the world. We teach our students to find answers to wh-questions (what, where, why and when), by taking advantage of the possibilities of information technology, information networks, web based learning platforms, as well as methods of problem based learning. 

OUR SCHOOL IN ACTION

We offer eight different courses in entrepreneurship and we hope that there are still more to come. Some of our courses are on the very basics of entrepreneurship, but we also have business camps, mini-companies, social entrepreneurship and product development together with real companies. In addition, we try to increasingly incorporate entrepreneurial pedagogy into all of our subjects. That means more projects, co-operation, group work, student made contents, and experiments. 

Our school year is divided into five periods. Our fifth period has been based on phenomenon learning for a few years and now we are in the front-line to make this even better working in our high school system. As Finland gets new curricula for high school very soon and preparation is going on, we are very pleased to see that our main interests (entrepreneurship and phenomenon based learning) are a big trend in the new curriculum. It confirms to us that we have chosen the path that many others are willing to follow, but we have many years of experience on issues that many schools are starting to face now. We are very proud of this and want to share our skills with other schools too.  

Our school is digitally equipped and we use new technologies in our practices. We have computers, tablets and most of our students have their own laptops and smartphones. Many school projects are made with shared documents, videos, photos and by using applications along with social media tools.

We are also interested in our students’ well-being. We try to get them more involved in our decision-making system and initiative. 

"We are very happy that we are in the ICEE project. With project resources we can travel more to other countries and learn from them, organise interesting events in the school and focus on promoting entrepreneurship through all school subjects. The knowledge we get from surveys is also of great value. We hope that with this project we will acquire more entrepreneurship skills for all our students in our school and in Finland," said Jenni Korte, Teacher and Project Leader of ICEE at Etu-Töölö Upper Secondary School.

SCHOOL WEBSITE: www.hel.fi/www/tyly/fi