The aim of this paper is to explore the challenges Finnish schools are facing in preparing their students for 21st century learning. The discussion is based on the Finnish data from the ITL study collected during school years 2010-2012. Analysis of the second year's data will build on the research from 2009-10, which found that educational leaders emphasized the need for changing teaching at schools towards more innovative teaching practices in order to enable students’ balanced growth and development. The school principals shared the ideas for school development and innovative teaching practices as their school’s goal. However, the school data revealed that teaching at the schools was predominantly based on traditional practices. Especially, transcending learning outside school walls was amazingly rare. The more innovative teachers with efforts of utilizing ICT at teaching were still single teachers or small group of teachers. It seemed to be rather difficult to spread out innovation to other classrooms. The teachers experienced a wide need for pedagogical support for their work. Their willingness to participate in the ITL study strengthened along the realization of related support for their development work alongside the case studies, data gathering as well as analyses of learning tasks at schools.