Treälven
The School of Three Rivers

Where?

Treälvsskolan is situated a couple of miles north of Östersund in a village called Lit. You find Lit in the northern part of Sweden and there is snow there for about half the year. Lit has beautiful surroundings that offers great fishing waters and a wonderful scenery. Here you can find traces after earlier generations; remains from the stone age, churches from the Middle Ages and the 17th century. You can also find the typical holes where the hunters used to catch moose in. Östersund is built round the Big Lake where legends say there lives a monster within the deep.

More then just a school

Treälvsskolan is more then just a school. Besides being a school with approximately 450 students there are also child-minders, a pre-school with about one hundred children, a library, a youth recreation centre and a family central. The unit is divided into three tracks all containing children from age one to sixteen. We feel that it’s rewarding to work at Treälvsskolan that comprise so many different functions. It gives us the opportunity to get to know the children in both school situations and on their spare time. All children has their own mentor who they meet every day. All teachers are mentors and has between ten and fourteen novices. There are one principal and one assistant principal that runs the school together with the rest of the staff using a process oriented leadership. Keywords are “by openness and clarity we creative participation”.

Pre-school

Our pre-school was the first one in northern Sweden to get an environmental certificate. The different teams in the pre-school has taken their names from the fish living in the rivers next to the school; Abborren (perch), Forellen (trout), Öringen (salmon trout) and Rödingen (char). The pre-schools work a lot with environment issues, language and ICT.

School

The school was one of the first in the county that started with aged-mixed classes. The school has students from age six to sixteen. There are three teacher teams within the school and they all have children between those ages. The teams have taken their names from the three Rivers running throughout the area: Långan, Hårkan and Indalen. The schools current priorities are student’s influence on their own learning, cooperative learning, interdisciplinary studies, creating teacher teams for children ages 6-16 and process-oriented leadership

Subjects

In school the following subjects can be found; Swedish, English, Mathematics, History, Geography, Religion, Social studies, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Technology, Art, Music, Home economics, Textile craft, Woodwork, PE and a Third language. The students learn their third language from 6th grade and they can choose from German, Spanish and French.
Most subjects are not read isolated from the others. Most of the time the student has interdisciplinary studies and usually has a topic where the different subjects together make a whole. Examples of such topics are The Environment, Culture, The City, The World We Live In etc.
The student also has two whole weeks each year where they can choose almost whatever they want to do. Working with architecture, climbing mountains, fishing, slalom, programming computers, break dance and so on.

International projects
The school is currently taking part in a Comenius project with other schools in Italy and Spain. The students continuously exchange ideas and work. Five teachers visited Spain last year to start up the project.
Several classes have also have had different international pen pals projects along the years. Last year we had a language assistant from Germany giving the German lessons extra depth. We have also had a teacher from Russia working for us for a couple of months. It has given both students and teachers insight in the differences of school culture and culture in general between European countries. We have also been using guest speakers from the USA, Great Britain, South Africa and Iran for example.

ICT

We have an ICT strategy for all children age one to sixteen. It tells what they should know leaving the pre-school, 5th grade and 9th grade when it comes to using computers. The mentor is responsible that the goals in the strategy are fulfilled. Often older student teach the younger ones about using their e-mail, surfing the Internet etc.

All classrooms have three computers and there are about 25 students in each classroom. All computers are connected to the Internet and our local network. We also have approximately ten digital cameras and a couple of scanners. Four teachers share one computer but many teachers bring their own laptop to work and hook it up on the local network. All computers got Microsoft Office with Word, Access, PowerPoint, Excel etc. Other programs we frequently use are Netscape Composer, Hyperstudio and PaintshopPro.

All teachers, parents and students from 5th grade and up have their own identity on First Class, an e-mail and conferencing system. We have had that since 1996 and it is now vital for our daily work. All internal information is shared among the staff and also much that concerns the students. Treälvsskolan has about forty sub-conferences for different groups, projects, classes and aims. Everyone also have a personal mailbox. It has become a natural way to communicate and is used on daily bases of both students and teachers.

The technology skills of the teachers are probably above average. All teams but one have gone through the ITiS (IT in the School) education. During five months the teachers take part in different activities, seminars and also make a project themselves wich has to be interdisciplinary, problem based and involve computer technology. As a ”reward” all participants get their own computer.
Most teachers have also taken a course for ten weeks at the university, IT and learning.

We have earlier had a teacher working part time with computer related issues. Now when most teachers have good computer skills we haven’t got the same need any longer. Instead we have a computer technician working full time with maintenance.

Treälvsskolan also have a pretty well developed web page with more the one hundred sub pages with information, minutes and more. The web page has an important task to spread information to the homes.