Connecting Your Why to Your How: Teaching as a Cultural Practice — Henna Lehtonen

This session centres on short video clips from a Finnish preschool, capturing small, ordinary moments from everyday life in Early Years practice. These moments offer a practice‑near insight into how values such as care, inclusion and relational teaching are lived through interactions between educators and young children. Rather than highlighting best practice or exemplary teaching, the session focuses on how culture and values are shaped through everyday decisions, routines and responses. Through selected video clips and guided reflection, participants are invited to look closely at what is happening and consider what these moments reveal about leadership and culture in Early Childhood Education. The session offers a calm space for leaders and educators to slow down, reflect together, and explore how change happens through everyday practice. Participants are encouraged to consider how values are lived — not just stated — in their own settings, and to connect their educational why with their everyday how in ways that support sustainable practice.

About the speaker

Henna Lehtonen is a former preschool teacher and currently a doctoral researcher in Educational Practice at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research explores values, cultural ideals and everyday practices in early years education. At the heart of her work is a commitment to helping educators reconnect with their why and translate it into a sustainable how in everyday practice. She works with Widgit Software on inclusive communication and lectures for See the Good!, driven by a commitment to wellbeing and positive school culture.