Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Tales from Finlandia



What makes good teaching?


I have been researching this idea for the last year or so, as I have noticed a discrepancy between the quality of teaching/learning from one classroom to another; even within the same school and subject matter. It generally boils down to the teacher, but there’s a saying leftover from my restaurant days that I love “The fish stinks from the head.” In schools the head is the principal, and/or the school district. The teachers have to be motivated, inspired, educated, and held accountable to be good. In any other industry people are fired if they become complacent and quit producing results. The integrity of the corporation is on the line.


I read a great article in the Smithsonian Magazine the other day titled “Why are Finland’s Schools so Successful?” by LynNell Hancock. I have read other accounts about how good Finland’s schools were, but most gave statistics and didn’t really surmise the magic formula. I have provided a link so I won’t reprint the whole article but I do want to point out some interesting points and quotes.


Before any of you start suggesting that National funding of education is an act of communism or socialism, consider this: More citizens educated = more citizens employed = fewer citizens on social programs = fewer taxes. So overall the investment in improving our educational system would actually call for less social program funding.


The Finns recognized this as the article states, “The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellant of the country’s economic recovery plan… ‘If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive.’”


Ultimately they discovered that they could spend less per student, “Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.”


So what is the magic formula? Well the culture does play a role to a certain degree, but in my opinion the smallest role. What seems to matter, according to the article, is that education and teaching are respected fields, “teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers.” Pride in their jobs is a big motivator for Finnish teachers. Additionally they despise competition between schools and standardized tests. They focus their time and energy on teaching and finding better ways of teaching and making lessons instead of creating tests, administering tests, grading tests, analyzing test scores, and publicizing test scores. I do feel tests have a place: to identify students and schools that might require more resources. But I don’t think funding should rely on achieving particular scores, or that students should get stomach aches from the intense pressure exuded by all school staff during test time. As a Finnish teacher commented “’We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.’”

Clearly we can’t just imitate a bunch of Finns and walk off, hand in hand, into the sunset, but there is a lot here to cause us to ask how and why we are doing things they way we are. With this blog I plan to leave little nuggets of ideas that I feel could direct our schools to better serve our children, and ultimately our communities.