If you ask anyone why kids do better in school in Finland than other countries, you will probably hear one answer more often anything else: They have great teachers. It is true that Finnish teachers are well prepared, widely respected and commonly trusted professionals. But are education systems successful just because of great teachers? Many would emphatically say “yes.” I would say, however, “not so fast!” Many of us…
read moreFor most governments, it’s their platform of education reforms that is politically one of the hardest programmes to push through. Yet push it through they do, in what has become a constant effort by politicians to keep reforming the structure and content of education systems to keep up with a fast and unpredictably changing world. Now a new report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, looking at the…
read morePublished on CNN 8 October 2014 Millions of American parents spend countless hours trying to figure out how to help their children get better grades, better teachers or better schools. They may want to take a page from Finland, which is considered to have one of the leading education systems in the world. Finnish students consistently score near the top in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, for reading,…
read moreMy address at the opining of the 2014 Frankfurt Book Fair on 7 October 2014 Alvar Aalto, Finland’s most renowned architect and designer, made the wise statement that “we should work for simple, good, undecorated things, but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street.” Similarly, one might say that Finnish teachers prefer traditional, reliable, calm teaching over…
read morewith John Graham - Published in Professional Voice, 10(1), pp. 46-53, summer 2014 JG Finland is seen to have one of the best schooling systems in the world. What elements of the Finnish system do you think make the difference and elevate the performance of its students above those in many other countries? PS Finland may be seen as having the best school system in the world by foreign media and some others but certainly…
read moreYou have written a thought-provoking piece, noting that the United States may produce promising ideas in education but lags in the implementation of those ideas—except perhaps the proliferation of standardized, high stake testing. A few comments: 1. In the US, experimentation has too often occurred in so-called "junk works", which are separate from the funding source. The most dramatic example is Xerox PARC—a research setting…
read moreOriginally published in Washington Post, 24 July 2014 An intriguing question whether innovation in education can be measured has an answer now. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in its recent report “Measuring Innovation in Education: A New Perspective, Educational Research and Innovation” measures Innovation in Education in 22 countries and 6 jurisdictions, among them the U.S. states Indiana, Massachusetts…
read moreby Pasi Sahlberg and Dennis Shirley Originally published in the Drum on 19 June 2014 Australia doesn't need to import education reform ideas from the US or elsewhere - its own Gonski reforms would remove the inequality which is holding its schools back, write Pasi Sahlberg and Dennis Shirley. One riddle of education debate today concerns the strange disconnect that occurs between how schools actually perform and how they are perceived.…
read moreOne thing that is common to successful education systems is that teaching and learning are guided or steered by system-level expectations that all schools must follow. But there are significant differences in how these expectations are technically employed. Many Canadian provinces, for example, set specific learning targets for most of the school subjects that all teachers and schools must respect. East Asian countries also set…
read moreFor years following the release of the 2001 and subsequent PISA results, edutourists visited Finland hoping to uncover their secrets. In the most recent survey, Finland's position had slipped from 2nd to 5th in reading, from 6th to 12th in mathematics and from 3rd to 5th in science. I recently talked with Pasi Sahlberg to better understand what could have contributed to this fall in the rankings. As former Director General…
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