COURSE DESCRIPTION In recent years international organizations have shown an increased interest in questions related to teachers, teacher education, and teacher policy. Most influential of these institutions are the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with its two global initiatives, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and…
read moreLast year marked another busy year in terms of visitors on this website: Over 200,000 visitors and nearly 3 million hits during 2014. Thank you all for that. I will do my best to manage this site so that the most recent material related to Finnish Lessons 2.0 would be available for you. You will also find all presentations that I make this year posted under “Finnish Lessons” manu as before. As far as my work…
read moreThe Book Fair opens on Wednesday 8 October, with the opening ceremony on Tuesday evening. Our speakers at the opening ceremony are author Sofi Oksanen, PhD Pasi Sahlberg and Finland’s president Sauli Niinistö. That is when Finland’s pavilion will be officially opened. Finland’s Minister of Culture and Housing, Pia Viitanen, will cut the ribbon, andTango Orchestra Unto will play Finnish tango music for…
read moreI am honored to be the recipient of the 2014 Robert Owen Award that is an annual recognition for inspirational educators issued by the Government of Scotland. This award is issued as part of Scotland’s hallmark annual education conference, the Scottish Learning Festival, in Glasgow every September. In the opening ceremony of the Scottish Learning Festival on 24th September Scotland’s education minister Michael Russell…
read moreNew and comprehensively updated edition of Finnish Lessons will appear in January 2015. The first edition that was published in November 2011 has had an unbelievable journey. It has been translated into 16 languages so far and counting. It won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award issued by the University of Louisville, KY, and took me to span in Parliaments of European Union, Scotland, England, Australia, New Zealand and Latvia. I have…
read moreINTERNATIONAL LESSONS FROM SUCCESSFUL EDUCATION SYSTEMS Fall 2014 Wednesdays 1:00 – 4:00 pm A-317 COURSE DESCRIPTION The performance of education systems has become a common indicator of success or failure of nations’ prosperity. Educational performance…
read moreI am honoured to teach two courses next academic year about international education at HGSE. in the fall semester 2014 there will be a repeater of A-317 that I taught this past spring. In spring 2015 semester I offer a new course for graduate and doctoral students titled “The Teaching Profession Around the World”. Here is a brief initial introduction to that program. There are two parts in this course…
read moreI am honoured to give this year’s R.W.B. Jackson lecture at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Here is the abstract of that talk: The quality of teaching and educational change are major areas of public concern in Canada and around the world. Today many governments in search of a panacea to improve educational performance turn to teachers, believing that if only they could…
read moreRise Above the Mark is a documentary narrated by Peter Coyote that brings to light the heartbreaking realities of public education. It’s the story of what happens when politics enters the classroom. Public schools are boxed in by current corporate reforms. Rules and regulations restrict vision, depreciate funding, demoralize teachers, and turn students into test-taking machines, robbing them of time to foster creativity.…
read moreMy HGSE course “International Lessons from Successful Education Systems” is looking at what we can and can’t learn from those education systems that have been able to successfully reform themselves so that both quality and equity of learning outcomes are high. The course syllabus includes study of some of those countries that have become successful reformers and high performers recently. South Korea, Japan,…
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