Team Academy in Finland - a new learning environment

Riitta Purokuru and Hannu Ryynanen

Riitta Purokuru, MA, is a lecturer and Hannu Ryynanen, MA, is senior Lecturer Jyvaskyla University of Applied Sciences, Language Centre, Finland.
E-mail: hannu.ryynanen@jypoly.fi

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Background
What is Team Academy?
New Principles, Methods and Practices
Learning in Team Academy
Freedom and Responsibility
Becoming a language coach of Team Academy, background
Some problems and questions
Learning through Dialogue
Project learning
Learning through experience
What has Team Academy given to us?
Conclusion

Team Academy is an inspiring and innovative new learning environment for business students within the Jyvaskyla University of Applied Sciences. The basic learning principle of the Academy is that of 'learning by doing', and three years ago they wanted to incorporate language learning as part of their programme. This article accounts for the creation of a language learning system for the Academy and it firstly gives a brief description of the Academy itself and after that focuses on the details of its present language learning activities.

Team Academy is "a school of entrepreneurs" created in 1993 by Mr Timo Partanen, who until then was a Senior Lecturer in Marketing in the School of Business Administration. It is part of the Jyvaskyla University of Applied Sciences (formerly Jyvaskyla Polytechnic), a city located 250 kilometres to the north of Helsinki, Finland. The annual intake of Team Academy is about 40 students who take a three-and-a-half year programme leading to a BA in Business Administration. Since its creation, Team Academy has trained almost three hundred students, most of whom come from the region of Central Finland. It has also created different training programs for business executives and entrepreneurs, including an MBA programme.

Team Academy is run by four coaches and the Head Coach, Mr Partanen, and it also benefits from the administrative and technical support of the University of Applied Sciences. Timo Partanen, who had earlier taught marketing at the Business School of Jyvaskyla, started to question the traditional teaching methods and decided to try a different, more practical approach to teaching marketing. He had an idea of placing an announcement on the wall of the School of Business saying "Would you like to take a trip around the world and learn a little marketing at the same time?" Twenty-six brave students responded to this appeal and, after several years of trials and errors, Team Academy has become a learning-by-doing institution training young business entrepreneurs and leaders.

Team Academy is located in a refurbished redbrick plywood factory of 1.000 square metres. All students have a key to the premises and they can come and go as they like, even at night. Instead of classrooms and desks there are removable walls, offices, PCs, cosy armchairs, plants, two rooms with big windows, called Aquarium and Terrarium, two other rooms, called Bartorium and Sofatorium and a large open space.

All over one can see young people talking in groups, typing, reading, phoning, strolling around and joking. A lot of smiling faces and cheerful voices. The pedagogy applied in Team Academy is not applied anywhere else in the world - only perhaps in the new emerging institutions similar to Team Academy.

The academic year starts with a period called 'Penguins' referring to the clumsy walk of those animals - and, perhaps, to the host of bewildered new students. During the first two weeks or so the new students form teams according to their preferences and decide about the name of the team: Bronco, Brain Laundry / Washery, Dajak, Innobizness, Kromix, ProArea, Seragan, Moguli etc.

In Team Academy a team is defined as a group of students who study together: they define their learning and performance goals and are responsible for their own and each others' learning. A team is the centre of the pedagogical process. The teams are also defined by their learning objective: all students belong not only to their home team but also to temporary teams such as project teams that can be formed for a specific purpose. Earlier the focus at Team Academy was on marketing and innovation, today it is on entrepreneurship.

Already during the first few weeks the new students start visiting local companies in order to detect the companies' needs and to offer their services. Little by little the teams start having business projects of their own with the local companies and each student is involved in these team projects. The teamsters deal with the customers, do the job and invoice them. Wine importation, marketing research, selling Christmas trees, company and event marketing, event creation, organising cafeterias, even in winter a log cafeteria on the ice at the skating rink on Lake Jyvasjarvi, all sections of business can be found among the operations of the teamsters. From project to project, which sometimes can fail - and do fail (bearing also the financial consequences of failures), the team will grow in an ongoing learning process.

The organisation of the Academy's own events is always entrusted to the students. For example, in January 06 a project team organised the 13th anniversary of Team Academy with almost 400 guests - former and present students, local business people, visitors from abroad etc.

Here are some other examples of the events organised by specific project teams: Brainstorm, for young entrepreneurs and business students, Firestorms for bigger companies where some of the lecturers come from the top of the business world (e.g. Jorma Ollila, the CEO of Nokia, Richard Teerlink, the former CEO of Harley & Davidson ), Coachstorms for teachers and educators from all over Finland. The teams earn real money through their projects and just before their graduation the teams go on a trip around the world or just to some exotic country to celebrate their graduation.
Some of the projects started by the students of Team Academy have become successful businesses that still exist today.

Freedom and responsibility are the basic principles of Team Academy. The students have all the freedom they want - yet they are responsible for their own learning. Instead of lectures, traditional teachers and exams, the Academy uses dialogue sessions as the central tool of learning. Twice a week each team meets with their coach for a learning dialogue sitting in comfortable violet armchairs in a circle. All participants explain what they have learned and how they have learned it. They exchange ideas in the presence of their coach and tell the group what they have learned from the books they have read. In this way the students are made aware of their learning process. One of the advantages of the dialogue sessions is also that tacit knowledge is made available to everybody.

In fact, learning to learn is one of the core disciplines "taught", just as marketing or leadership. This, however, may lead us to ask about theory. How do they learn the theoretical thinking that lies behind "doing business"? The answer is that Team Academy students also learn by reading. Each student must earn 120 book points by reading books from the book list - a bibliography compiled over the years, as well as updated annually, by T. Partanen - where there are more than 1,000 books selected and rated by range of difficulty covering a wide array of topics such as marketing, leadership, management and spiritual growth to mention but a few. The students give presentations and write essays on the books not by summarizing the content but by stating what they have learned and how the books have helped them with their projects.

We sometimes hear questions such as 'Can you really trust the students to have read the books and thus earned the book points? What if they lie?' After having learned to understand the system and its difference compared to traditional teaching methods, we would say that such questions are irrelevant because the students really bear the responsibility for their learning. If one is not honest, it will come out one way or the other because the teamsters have an unconditional trust in each other. If one betrays this trust, he/she may be fired from the team, and as a team is the core unit - one's home base so to speak - it is in anyone's best interest to stay in the team.

In Finnish higher education there is a compulsory language component in the degree requirements: 3 ECTS credits of English and 3 ECTS credits of Swedish. Earlier the Team Academy students took part in the 'traditional' language courses of the Jyvaskyla University of Applied Sciences but gradually there was a need for Team Academy to have its own language learning programme that would be in accordance with the Academy's learning philosophy.

Three teachers of the Language Centre of the Jyvaskyla University of Applied Sciences accepted the task of constructing a language programme for the Academy. This was by no means a new and strange situation for the centre because over the years it had already been challenged to adopt new language learning methods such as distance learning, e-learning, portfolio learning, integrated language learning and problem-based learning. Therefore, creating a language programme that would be consistent with the Academy's philosophy and provide the students with meaningful and motivating learning situations was just another new challenge.

As we started to plan the language courses, we, perhaps quite naturally, had the following questions running through our minds: Can we actually let the students decide what they want and need to learn? How to create those learning needs? How about those with poor basic skills? What will the quality of the learning outcomes be? We realised, however, that some of these questions were, in fact, reflections of the more traditional approach to teaching and that most of them could not be answered until we had had our first 'courses' with the students. Hence, we decided to let them linger at the back of our minds and patiently wait for an answer in due course.

Moreover, we realised that the following set of questions might be more fruitful at the planning stage: What sort of (traditional?) activities could be used? Are there any real-life or any other kinds of practical language learning situations for the students in the regular life of the Academy? Can some of the existing Team Academy activities be used for language learning? These questions were actually the ones that led us to try with the following four learning paths: Guided learning, Dialogue learning, Project learning and Learning through experience.

The purpose of the Guided learning path is to strengthen the students' basic skills, grammar and vocabulary. In accordance with the principle of learning by doing the students were given learning tasks that included teaching the outcomes to the others. Here the teacher's role was to focus on elaborating on the content and supporting the students. This approach worked well with students of at least the intermediate level. However, we soon found out that those with basic learning needs did not seem to manage on their own and with them we decided to go back to a more traditional approach containing textbooks, homework, grammar revision etc. At the moment this seems to work well. However, our future challenge is to create ways of basic language learning that would be based on Team Academy's philosophy.

This is the most valuable tool in Team Academy's learning system and it woks very well in language coaching as well. The students read books and reflect on their learning by way of giving presentations and writing essays just as they would in their regular business learning. The only difference is that this time they do everything in English. Here, of course, the emphasis is on self-managed learning, reflections and critical thinking. These dialogue sessions work well with students of high intermediate and advanced levels. This learning path has become the best functioning tool of the language programme. The only future challenge here is to motivate some of the students to work as hard as with similar assignments in Finnish.

In this path the students work on real-life projects that take place, at least partly, in English. One way of applying this method is related to the ever increasing number of foreign visitors to Team Academy. As is the case with many other Team Academy functions, the students have a major responsibility for hosting international guests. Planning the programme for the guests, preparing presentations and written material on Team Academy, contacting the visitors in advance and, finally, conducting a debriefing situation to look back on how everything went are clearly operations that could be integrated with an element of language learning. It may, however, be that these 'projects' are usually so small that they do not amount to form the content of a whole course but they can at least be combined with dialogue learning.

Another example of a more comprehensive application of the Project learning method was JPM-Winos, a student cooperative company that imports wines to Finland. They had a clear need to study cross-cultural issues as well as the principles of business communication. Therefore, learning of the language of telephoning, writing faxes, e-mails and other business documents as well as getting acquainted with the business cultures of the clients' countries took place with the language coach. All the business communication was genuine and took place between the students of JPM-Winos and their foreign business associates. It is perhaps obvious that this type of Project Learning works well with senior students who have a clear vision on what they need to learn.

In this path partnerships with learning communities around the world are set up and the students go for 3-6-month exchange periods abroad where language learning is one of the objectives. The only thing is that at this point Team Academy's international relations are still under development and so far there have been only a few opportunities for long exchange periods. However, as similar learning communities are emerging in Europe, for example in France, the Netherlands, Germany Italy, Spain and U.K., there will be more opportunities of this nature in the future.

We certainly have gained some new insights on learning by coaching at Team Academy. We have noticed that this new approach can also be used with our traditional English groups. We have now more courage to break rules as we have started to question our traditional teaching methods. On the other hand, we have also acquired a new kind of faith in our professionalism by understanding that even in this new environment language teaching professionals are needed.

Team Academy is a challenge to traditional ideas of learning and teaching. Their idea of 'learning by doing' works with academic and business learning. We have also realized that becoming a language coach is a never-ending process where our teaching approach at this point is a mixture of tradition and innovation. Hopefully the future will see us developing ways and methods of language learning that are even more consistent with the novel approach to learning that Team Academy so strongly believes in.

Please check the What's New in Language Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Skills of Teacher Training course at Pilgrims website.