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:

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the-english-language-is-holding-kids-back/385291/

And this academic article too:

http://www.elemedu.upatras.gr/english/images/porpodas/Seymour_Aro_Erskine_Porpodas_et_al_2003_BJP.pdf

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. 

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG14_06_Hanushek_Piopiunik_Wiederhold.pdf

This article in Smithsonian paints a bigger picture of Finnish education than what I've offered here:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/

In many classrooms (and I include mine in this generalization), opportunities for academic student talk often end up with students speaking in parallel at an escalating volume.  When I ask students to turn and talk about what might happen next in a story we're reading, one student might turn to a classmate and say what he thinks, his partner might then make his prediction, and the "conversation" would be over.

In order to make student talk more productive, many teachers post a chart on the wall that lists "Rules for Accountable Talk," containing the conversational tricks that adults use: "I agree with you because...," "I disagree with you because...." "What do you mean by that?" and "I see what you mean, but..."  I've seen these phrases work in certain classrooms, particularly ones where students have heard actual people saying these things.  They tend not to work so well in classrooms like mine, where students mainly hear Spanish at home and where, for those who do hear English, they tend not to hear it spoken this way.  Students in this kind of classroom can certainly pick up these tricks, but they need to be taught how to use them in a more explicit way than just seeing them posted on the wall.

Here's one activity that teaches "I agree" and "I disagree" more explicitly and that I plan on including in my final project:
1.  Divide students into pairs and name Student A and Student B.
2.  Give each student 3 wooden blocks of different shapes and a paper plate as a building area.
3.  Tell Student A to put down one block on the plate.
4.  Explain that Student B now has two choices: leave his partner's block where it is and add a new block to the piece, or move his partner's block..  He can say, "I agree with you and I'll put my block here."  Or he can say, "I disagree with you because I think it looks better here."
5.  Explain that Student A has to accept whatever Student B does with the blocks, at which point Student A can make the same verbal choice as Student B.
6.  Students continue taking turns placing blocks until they have used up all 6 blocks.

The idea here is that the blocks become a metaphor for a conversation, in that a successful conversation is a series of utterances in which each utterance responds in some way to the one that preceded it.  This activity also gets at the notion that a good conversation is organic and doesn't necessarily have a predefined objective (your partner may move the block you originally placed and that's OK).  This stands in contrast to the mode of parallel statements that many children (and some adults!) easily fall into, in which one conversation partner's speech has no bearing on the other partner's.  Obviously there are more conversational tricks than "I agree" and "I disagree," but it's a starting point.  After leading this activity several times, the teacher would then make the metaphor explicit by asking a question that students have to answer with a partner and reminding them to speak and act just like they did when they were building with blocks.

Frances and I are in Finland right now, visiting some friends we know here.  On Monday and Tuesday I'll be attending a workshop on the Finnish education system, visiting some classrooms in a city called Tampere and attending sessions on what makes the Finnish system THE BEST IN THE WORLD.  It seems that most Finns don't actually like to talk about it in these flamboyant terms, but jump on the Finnish education fetish train with me and read this article in advance of the workshop:

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/17/highly-trained-respected-and-free-why-finlands-teachers-are-different

More than a handful of people have asked me about the differences I notice between British schools and American schools.  I could answer that question by describing pedagogical differences, differences in classroom management, the fact that British classrooms tend to be much more multilingual than American classrooms, among many others.  But I think the simplest answer is...tea.

Every school I visit offers me a "cuppa" tea the moment I walk in the door.  And the offers of tea usually continue throughout the day...when teachers break while their kids are at playtime (recess), at lunch, when the kids go to afternoon playtime (recess), and basically any time I pass near the staff room.  At one school I believe I was offered tea six times over the course of  a six-hour school day!  And there is an infrastructure for the amount of tea consumed: there is always an enormous hot water boiler, the size of a microwave, bolted to the wall right above the sink in the staff room; and many schools have these large sacks containing a bushel of tea bags.

There's definitely something to be said for all this tea-drinking.  Because it's hot and because you almost never see to-go cups, it forces teachers to stop and breathe for a few minutes in between parts of the day instead of rushing to get ready for whatever lesson is coming next.  It also makes you feel like you're staying at a bed and breakfast, and who doesn't like bed and breakfasts?

Teachers need to be academically indulgent.  I'm not sure if I'll stick with that term in the long run, but it seems to fit what I've been thinking about lately.  Let me explain.  For those of you just joining in, I'm using my Fulbright grant to study how teachers and kids talk to each other.  There's a longer explanation in the sidebar to the right, but I'm basically interested in the idea that what teachers say (or don't say) matters and that teachers need to be more conscious of the verbal tools they choose to use in the classroom.

Recently, I've been thinking about two brief student-teacher interactions (one from yesterday in the UK and the other from several years ago in the US) that are helping me figure out how to describe the kind of teaching that involves making the right verbal choices to support learning:

Interaction 1
A class is looking at a photograph of a tiger with its mouth open.  Students are asked to write down similes about the tiger that could eventually be used in a short story.  When students share their similes, they all describe the tiger as scary.
Student 1: It has teeth like blades.
Teacher: Ooh, very scary. 
Student 2: Whiskers like a spider's legs.
Teacher: Good, I'll write it down.
Student 3: It has whiskers like old ladies' hair.
Teacher: Oh, that's great, that's beautiful!  But does it make the tiger sound fierce?  Would I be scared of a little old lady with white hair?  No, let's think of different similes.

Interaction 2
At the end of recess, a child comes to his teacher with a rock he found on the playground.
Student: Look at this rock.  Can I bring it in to show the class?
Teacher: That's really interesting, but we're not studying rocks anymore.  Leave it outside.

In both of these cases, teachers saw success and then changed the terms.  In the first example, the teacher hadn't said anything about the similes needing to make the tiger seem fierce.  If the teacher had used the same flexible thinking as his student, he could have acknowledged that the "old ladies' hair" simile was taking the discussion in a different direction and asked if anyone else could think of a simile that made the tiger seem vulnerable.  In the second example, every teacher can relate to the feeling that there is so much to teach in the course of a school day that we just don't have time for Roberto to share his chunk of asphalt when we're supposed to be learning about water.  But thinking a little more flexibly, why not invite the rock into the classroom and allow Roberto a few minutes to share his find at snack, or the line at the bathroom, or dismissal to teach the class not only that you can still think about what you've learned earlier in the year but that your curiosity and connections and intellect and academic engagement have value.  When we we tell Roberto to leave the rock outside, we unintentionally say, "I wasn't that interested in rocks in the first place.  But we're studying water now, so bring me a puddle and then I'll be happy."

So for now I'm using the term "academically indulgent" to describe a teacher that sees his students as intellectuals with ideas to be indulged (and also nudged along toward some learning goal) instead of as adversaries whose rocks and other wrong answers insidiously prevent us from getting through the lesson.

Multiple-Choice Question
What would you say when, after finishing a unit on cartography two weeks ago, a student asks, "Can I make a treasure map?"

A.  We do social studies at 3:00.
B.  We learned about maps two weeks ago.
C.  Sure, at indoor recess you can find some paper.  Why don't you see if anyone else would like to join you?

For the next seven weeks, I'll be spending Tuesday afternoons with a Year 4 (third grade) class at Daleview Academy, teaching a unit called "America: The Biggest, Bestest, Red-White-and-Bluest Country on Earth."  That's not really the title, but I am teaching a unit on America, weaving in geography, anthropology, political science, and semiotics, as I proselytize for the lost colonies across the pond.

I started today's lesson by clearing up a misconception that the United States is also called Central America because it's in between Canada and Mexico.  I decided to just show where Central America really is and not explain that the US would never stand for being named in relation to the other countries around it.  WHAT IS THIS?...SOUTH AFRICA?...NORTH KOREA?...A WHOLE COUNTRY OF WEST VIRGINIAS?  NO, we're the United States of America, front and center where we ought to be, like when you go down the marker aisle at Staples and they have the Sharpies right in the middle and the off-brand markers that dry up before the end of a yard sale poster way off to the side, because who wants those when a single Sharpie could take you all the way through at least your next five yard sales.  THAT'S RIGHT, WE'RE LIKE A CHISEL-TIP SHARPIE, WHICH GIVES YOU MANY OPTIONS FOR LINE THICKNESS.  Alright, I think my new remit as American ambassador to Leeds may have gone to my head.

The above paragraph notwithstanding, the lesson went quite well.  After looking at a map of the United States and discussing what we noticed about the shapes and names of the states, the students rotated around the classroom to six stations, each representing a different state (New York, Florida, Texas, California, Colorado, and Alaska--sort of a "best of").  At each station, students saw two photographs, one of a person welcoming them to that state and the other of the state's most salient landscape.  Students documented their "travels" through drawing and writing and then came back together to describe similarities and differences between the states they visited.  Most kids had prior knowledge about New York, and some had heard of Florida, but this activity gave kids a better sense of the geographic diversity in the US and helped them understand why questions like "What's the weather like in America?" and "Are there mountains?" are tough to answer.  Next week's lesson will ask students to make comparisons between similar landscapes in the US and the UK (i.e., New York City/London, Rocky Mountains/Scottish Highlands, Miami Beach/Brighton).

At the Park Road Primary School (name changed) in Bradford, teachers use a standardized gesture system called Makaton (www.makaton.org).  It's a set of hand movements that teachers and students use to facilitate communication.  Unlike a true sign language, Makaton gestures are used in conjunction with speech because it's geared for English language learners and other students who may need a bridge to spoken English.  Teachers have been trained in it and seem to use it pretty fluently, especially in the younger grades.  Lots of ELL kids use it as well because it seems like it boosts their confidence to participate in a class discussion taking place in English.