Invited 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…
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…
read moreAndy Hargreaves, Pasi Sahlberg and Dennis Shirley Boston Globe, 28 March 2014 Monday’s hot-off-the-press report on “The New Opportunity to Lead: A Vision for Education in Massachusetts in the Next 20 Years,” commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, presents an erroneous diagnosis of the state of education in the Commonwealth and proposes remedies that are based on ideology, not evidence. While there…
read moreMany Americans who visit Finland to examine its education system are surprised by how rarely students are required to take standardized tests during their 12 years of schooling. They learn that students are primarily assessed by multiple teacher-made tests that vary from one school to another. At the national level sample-based student assessments similar to NAEP that have no stakes for students, teachers, or schools are the main…
read more"A truly successful education system has students of all socio-economic backgrounds scoring highly on PISA tests" When PISA results were first presented 12 years ago, the participating countries were excited to see how their school systems perform compared to one another. Now the launch of the fifth PISA results is accompanied by more criticism than before due to the issues with cross-country comparisons and the dominant role…
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