How Finnish Schools Teach Collaboration and Teamwork

In Finland, collaboration is not left to chance or confined to a single group project. It is one of the named transversal competencies woven into the national curriculum, taught deliberately across every subject in the K-5 years.

Collaboration as a named national competency, not an add-on

Many education systems treat teamwork as a soft, informal outcome of group work, something that happens if a project happens to require it. Finland takes a more deliberate approach: collaboration and working life competence are named explicitly among the seven transversal competencies introduced in the 2014 national core curriculum reform, alongside skills such as thinking and learning to learn, multiliteracy and participation in a sustainable future.

This matters because it changes how teachers plan. A Finnish teacher is expected to consider how a maths lesson or a science project also builds a child's ability to work with others, not just their subject knowledge, since these transversal competencies apply across the whole curriculum rather than sitting inside one subject.

The working life competence and entrepreneurship strand specifically names project management, teamwork and leadership as skills to be developed from an early age, connecting classroom collaboration directly to the kind of teamwork children will eventually need beyond school.

What collaborative learning looks like in a K-5 classroom

In practice, Finnish primary classrooms use pair and small group work as a routine method, not an occasional treat. Children might work together to investigate a phenomenon based learning project, solve a maths problem as a group, or plan and deliver a short presentation as a team.

Teachers deliberately design the physical and social learning environment to support this: seating that allows easy group formation, tasks structured so that success genuinely depends on contribution from every member, and explicit teaching of skills like listening, taking turns and resolving disagreement, rather than assuming children will simply pick these up.

This routine use of group work also supports executive function and self regulation, since working productively in a group requires children to manage impulses, negotiate and stay focused on a shared goal, skills that are difficult to build through individual seatwork alone.

Why this matters beyond the classroom

Finland's rationale for building collaboration into the curriculum this explicitly is straightforwardly practical: most work, in almost any field, depends on the ability to work effectively with other people, and this is treated as a skill to be taught with the same seriousness as reading or arithmetic, not assumed to develop by chance.

For schools applying Finnish pedagogy through OPPI, this means collaboration is planned into lessons across subjects from the early primary years, rather than reserved for occasional group projects later in a child's schooling.

The wider aim connects to Finland's broader approach to entrepreneurship and life skills: teamwork, initiative and the confidence to contribute ideas in a group are treated as foundational, not as extras layered on top of academic content once the 'real' learning is done.

In Finland, teamwork is not what happens around the curriculum, it is written into it.

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