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Finnish Lessons

Dec 21, 202410 min read

Finnish Lessons

Date Finished: Dec 30, 2021 Author: Pasi Sahlberg Tags:problembased

Evolutionary way of Finnish education system through the eyes of a man responsible.

🎨 Impressions

How I Discovered It

Who Should Read It?

All levels of educators.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

πŸ“’ Ideas

  • Teaching is an intellectual enterprise with research and future findings.

    • Teachers are scientists, who ask questions and conduct pedagogical research.

  • The Third Way of delivering knowledge

    • Is renting and spreading policies of others.

  • The Fourth way of teaching is:

    • Shared ownership of results
    • Developing purpose.
    • The best way is to learn from other teachers.

Key questions we are looking into are

  • How to improve schools for students to learn new types of knowledge and skills required in an unpredictably changing world?
  • How to make this new way of learning accessible to all students, regardless of their socioeconomic conditions?

Books to follow

  • The flat world education by Linda Darling-Hammond
  • The Fourth way by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley

The main idea behind a book is how to improve education system without exhausting curricular and endless assessments. Describing change in attitude from punishment to responsibility and trust. This approach rhymes with radical candor from NETFLIX (it’s the second time I am getting back to this book).

  • Three important elements of such improvement are:
    • Inspiring vision of what good public education could be.
    • Get all great practices that there are and adopt them to your needs and according to individual culture of the country.
    • Systematic development of respectful and interesting working conditions for teachers and opinion leaders at school.
  • Organizing in class students with different background and aspirations requires special approach.
  • Career guidance and counseling is a must at school.
    • This what makes school interesting.
    • Real life application of knowledge.

Schools should function as small-scale democracies.

Berry ΠΈ Sahlberg - Accountability affects the use of small group lear.pdf

The pressure of classical teaching approach and external assessments of pupils has dramatic effects and consequences.

  • The traditional presentation-recitation model of teaching must be gradually displaced by a flexible, open and interaction-rich environment.
    • The role of a student comes first.
    • And the role of a teacher is also evolving.
      • Slowly but steadily.

Philosophy of peruskoulu

Unpacking the Research and Philosophy Behind the Finnish Education System peruskoulu

Knowledge is dynamic

Technological advancements lead to problems: isolated knowledge, unnecessary information, and technological determinism.

Books and articles to follow

  • Conception of knowledge (1989)
  • Conception af learning (1989)
  • About possibilities of school change (1990)

Questions that I must seek answer to:

Standards, assessment, and programs are not important at school, but instructions, the way we deliver them are. They are the only key element of a students’ success.

  • Comprehensive school reform triggered three particular aspects:
    • Bring together variety of students.
      • Different circumstances, and aspirations.
      • It demands fundamentally new approaches.
    • Career guidance is compulsory.
      • It’s made part of the school. We have something similar, but it’s not compulsory yet. Though it should.
    • Teachers from grammar schools and work-oriented schools must work in the same schools with students with diverse abilities.

Proverb: If everybody thinks the same way, nobody thinks very much.

Academic Olympiads can’t be used to gauge a success rate of students.

Then what factors and what to measure to evaluate a successful education reform?

  • The analyses of Finnish education reform demonstrates four main domains where progress has happened:
    • Increased level of education attainment of the adult population.
    • Widespread equity in terms of learning outcomes and performance of schools.
    • A good level of students learning as measured by international student assessments.
      • Russia doesn’t participate, that’s why it’s excluded from the survey.
      • Though I might be wrong. Need to look it through more closely.
    • Efficient and moderate overall spending, almost solely on public sources.
      • The same is true for Russia.

Teacher education and mathematics curriculum in Finland have a strong focus on problem-solving, which is happening nowadays to our syllabi too.

  • Primary school teachers were redesigning science teaching and learning in schools, it gives an opportunity to children to have a hands-on experience with science.
  • More than 10% teacher graduates from university of Helsinki have masters’ degree in science education.
  • Thus, the science curriculum in comprehensive schools has been transformed from traditional academic knowledge-based to experiment and problem-oriented curriculum.
    • It makes use of meta-subject interactions.
  • Look at the current pedagogycal principles of contemporary science teaching and learning in USA and England. What innovative approaches are used in schools there?

Grade repetition is an evil practice which casts a shadow right into adulthood.

  • Rather than repeating and entire grade for a whole year, a student should continue his education further but repeat only unsuccessful courses.

  • Finnish education has three paradoxes at its core.

    • Teach less, learn more. ^0516a5
      • No homework.
      • Teachers have maximum of 4-5 lessons.
      • Students get fewer instructions, but possibly it is due to the active classroom framework, that is focused on project work?
      • Leads to less anxiety and stress.
    • Test less, learn more.
      • Frequent testing in a mark of competitive environment.
        • That urges teachers to redesign curriculum in favor of drilling and cramming methods rather than understanding.
      • Another route is possible.
      • Assessment in Finland can be divided into three categories.
        • Classroom, conducted by teachers. Diagnostic, formative and summative assessment.
        • Term’s end comprehensive evaluation, after each term.
        • Regular nationwide assessment that touches 10% of 6th and 9th graders.
        • 5th and 6th graders are assessed with descriptive assessement and feedback. According to description in school education plan.
    • *More equity through growing diversity *
      • Russian inclusiveness.

Survey of Finnish mating market demonstrated a rather interesting phenomenon. Males are usually looking a teacher for a spouse. Actually, there are two professions that compete: a doctor and a teacher. Females on the other hand are looking for a doctor. It clearly points to the status of the profession in the society. Interesting occurrence, is it the same in Russia.

Follow up: Finnish educator Matti Koskenniemi and notion of "Education love" as a corner stone of theory of action. I think it is Vigotsky's concept.

What’s so special about Finnish teachers?

  • The most crucial aspect is teacher’s workplace, that allows them to fulfill moral mission.
    • Professional learning community (PLC), it is how they work in schools.
  • Finnish teacher’s education is based on academic approach, it means that it is supported be scientific knowledge and focused on thinking processes and cognitive skill required to conduct an educational research.
    • Attention is devoted to building pedagogical skills that enable the teacher to manage instructional processes in accord with contemporary educational knowledge and practice.
    • Primary school teacher study three thematic areas:
      • Theory of education.
      • Pedagogical content knowledge.
      • Subject didactic and practice.

Research-based teacher education has three key principles:

  • Need of a deep knowledge of the most recent advances of research in the subject they teach.
    • In addition, they have to know the research on how something can be taught and learned.
  • Research-oriented attitude adopted toward their work. It prepares teachers, at all levels, to work in complex, changing societal and educational environments.
    • Be rational with the data and evidence they are presented during their work.
    • Draw logical conclusions from it.
    • Ability to observe hidden processes, make an assumption and analyze personal experience.
  • Teacher education in itself is an object of study and research.

Maybe we should divide teacher practice into three phases: basic practice, advanced practice and final practice.

By doing that it is possible to make a spiral sequence of theoretical knowledge, practical training and research-oriented enquiry of teaching.

Assessment is not important, it doesn’t demonstrate understanding, at maximum it’s function stops after the test.

Cramming is a bad strategy for learning.

  • Curriculum, teaching and learning are priority components in education.
    • They must drive teacher’s thinking and school practice.
    • Not focus on assessment and testing.
  • Teaching, caring, and education is too complex process to be measured by quantitative metrics alone.

Novel statistical techniques, called value-added modeling (VAM), are intended to resolve the problem of socioeconomic and other differences by adjusting for students’ prior achievement and demographic characteristics.

Bologna Process directs overall educational higher-education structures. What is it?

Journals to find and read School effectiveness and School improvement est. 1990 Journal of Educational change est. 2000

  • Research on education system suggests that if a policy of predetermined results emphasized, teachers tend to incline towards guaranteed content excluding creativity and experimenting from their repertoire technique.
  • Drivers of change in educational system:
  • Wrong VS Correct drivers are:
    • Accountability VS professionalism.
    • Teacher quality VS collegiality.
    • Technology VS pedagogy.
    • Fragmented thinking VS system thinking.

The most of what student must learn in school cannot be formulated in clear and understandable standards. It is intuitive work, experimenting scientific explorations and constant questioning and reflection. Make schools a creative and inspiring place to teach and learn.

Global Education Reform Movement VS Finnish Education Policies since 1990

Conservatism VS Progress

  • Teaching must be careful teachers should stick to the past in learning but prepare for the future in teaching.

Steinbock 2010, p.47

Nokians believe that in a rapidly changing and highly complex technology and marketing business, a broad and diverse executive team can provide stability, flexibility, and simplicity in decision-making. What killed it?

The key message of this book is that schools in competition-driven education environments are stuck in a tough educational dilemma. The current culture of accountability in the public sector as it is employed in England, North America, and many other parts of the world often threatens school and community social capital; it damages trust rather than support it.1 As a consequence, teachers and school leaders are no longer trusted; there is a crisis of suspicion, as O’Neill has observed (2002). Although the pursuit of transparency and accountability provides parents and politicians with more information, it also builds suspicion, low morale, and professional cynicism.

  • If anybody tries to repeat success, he has to keep in mind that separately elements of the system don’t work, only in accord.
  • Certain aspects should be considered before applying any ideas from Finnish education system:
    • Technical drivers of good educational performance: research-based teacher education, professional support for teachers, smart accountability, relatively small school, good education leadership within schools.
    • Sociocultural factors: social value of literacy and education, high work morality.
    • Links to public-policy sectors: success of the sector depends on success of others.

The vision of future schools lies on a dream of true transformation into knowledge-based society, where community of learners is formed and learning sparks from individual interests, passion, and creativity and aims to find each their own talent. Pekka Himanen school 2.0, Finnish Philosopher.

  • Create a community of learners that provides the conditions to be wrong, possibility to find talent. Make mistakes possible and safe.
  • Time is ripe to rethink and reinvent schools. Stir them from teaching conventional subjects such as mother tongue or math and allocate more time for integrated themes, projects, action-based education, problem-based education.
    • This in time will become one of the basic functions of schools: the ability to teach cooperation and problem-solving in small groups of diverse people.
    • Cover non-academic discipline such as creativity, handling of complex information and presentation skills.
      • Learn at schools.
      • Create something new in schools.

Look for John Dewey ideas about schools

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