Ella Kopra

In the ongoing, smaller-scale SILTA-project the focus is on developing lower-secondary level subject teachers’ pedagogical practices when teaching culturally and linguistically diverse groups of students. SILTA is funded by Teacher Education Forum (2025–2026) and has a strong emphasis on producing practically applicable research outcomes. In this project, I have been responsible for arranging, developing and presenting research-based workshops for teachers, setting up digital surveys for gathering repeated student responses on their lesson engagement and managing the gathering of video recordings of teachers during lessons. As for analyzing the video data of teaching, the approach has been theory-led to produce quantitative data of teachers’ practices. This information will later be combined with student-reported lesson engagement for my second article.

In the Ministry of Education and Culture funded VOITTO-project (2023–2025) I was involved in examining newly arrived migrant students’ school engagement and their literacy skill development during their first year of attending school in Finland at the lower-secondary-level. My responsibilities included administering the literacy tasks to students at several schools and running the quantitative analyses to illustrate new arrivals engagement and language learning over the year. Additionally, I took part in further developing these literacy tasks to a literacy skills assessment material for preparatory education teachers.

Other experience

My previous work experience includes data management and conducting teacher and student interviews. As a primary education teacher with Finnish language and literature studies, I also have experience in primary- and lower secondary level teaching across school subjects. Outside academia, you can find me engaged in various crafts.