As a
caveat to everything that follows this sentence, I'll point out that
I only spent two days observing just two schools in one city in
Finland. So while I won't attempt to turn what little I've observed
and read about the Finnish education system into a fine-grained,
comparative analysis on what makes Finnish schools excel, I will
list, in order of personally identified importance, what I think
might be some key factors in their success:
6.
Finnish orthography is extremely transparent, which means that even
more than in Spanish, reading Finnish involves knowing individual
letter sounds and putting those sounds together as they are written
in a word. Since Finnish kids need less time learning to decode than
Anglophone kids, who have to figure out how to claw through digraphs
(ch/sh/th/ph/kn), vowel teams (the three sounds for ou),
and silent letters, they can progress more quickly to higher order
learning. Does anyone else find this a
compelling enough reason
to adopt Finnish as our
national language? English
already has plenty of Finnish loan words like sauna
and...and…
Check
out this article from The Atlantic:
And
this academic article too:
5.
Students and teachers don't wear shoes in the classroom. Instead,
they leave their shoes outside and put on socks, slippers, or Crocs
(yes, Crocs!). And while I don't think Crocs are the answer to
America's educational woes, I do think it sends a message that
school, though necessarily rigorous and serious, is a place where
kids should be comfortable, happy, and at home.
4.
Few Finns cross the street against a “Don't Walk” sign. Finland
is of course not the only country where jaywalking is a less than
common practice, but I found the explanation for it striking. I'll
go ahead and generalize: whereas people in other non-jaywalking
countries (and I've heard this from a Swiss person, so it must be
true) wait to cross the street because conformity to the rules has
value in its own right, Finnish people explain that they will cross
against the light only when there are no children present because
although adults can judge when the intersection is safe enough to
cross, they wouldn't want to model this practice in front of those
with a less developed capacity to assess risk. Just one anecdote, but
there has to be something there about how a country's bigger people
collectively perceive their responsibility toward its smaller people.
3.
Finland has more legitimate, socially valued, and economically viable
post-secondary options than the US. In addition to traditional
universities for students with academic goals, there is also a system
of polytechnic schools that offer a route to a trade like carpentry,
plumbing, electrical work, and forestry—lines of work that are as
important as in any country but that have more value in Finland.
Instead of facing the choice between college, the military, and
failure—a choice often presented in terms that stark to American
high-schoolers—Finnish students can see many paths to success.
This trickles down to the primary level, where students have
opportunities to excel in more non-academic ways than in American
schools. In addition to reading, writing, math, science, history,
and foreign language (two, since Swedish and English are both
compulsory), all kids take craft
(woodworking/metalwork/engineering/design), textiles
(sewing/knitting), and art. This means that a student who is
relatively less successful in traditional academic areas still has
opportunities to achieve at school. And because the Finnish
education system (and Finnish society more broadly) is structured in
a way that offers non-academic post-secondary options, a
high-achiever in craft education knows that future options exist
within the traditional education system, other than dropping out of
school.
2.
Teachers generally teach the same class of students from first grade
through sixth grade. At the warm and fuzzy level, I can think of
nothing more professionally satisfying than getting to spend six
years with the class I taught last year. At the quantitative level,
research shows that keeping teachers with the same class over several
years benefits students in a variety of ways
(http://www.ericdigests.org/1998-2/looping.htm), especially when…see
below...
1.
Teachers are smart. It almost doesn't seem worth taking up valuable
internet real estate with this obvious proposition, but I'll go ahead
anyway...kids learn more from smarter teachers. There are of course
many ways to be smart, but Finnish teachers are more capable in math and literacy—the key subject areas that schools
around the world teach—compared to their international peers.
According to the article below, written by one of the big names in
studying the quantitative value of teachers, if American teachers
were as smart as Finnish teachers, American students would move half
a standard deviation on PISA, an internationally administered test
that measures the cognitive ability of high school students.
This
article in Smithsonian paints a bigger picture of Finnish
education than what I've offered here:
I think the social safety net helps, too. -Frances
ReplyDeleteI taught the same students for four years. We became comfortable with each other and did not have to spend valuable time at the beginning of each year getting to know each other or the expectations. We moved along quickly and the students had great success.
ReplyDeleteI am impressed by the different tracks where success can be achieved.
Grandma