Coetail

There are so many better & engaging ways to furnish a space.

Leadership roles should match priorities, not history.

Students must learn to be engaged learners. Parents need to grow their understanding of the realities their children will face, not re-live their own school experience.

Teaching could be about creative direction, rather than about behaviour management.

Curriculum should be meaningful, contextual, authentic, integrated, challenge based, relational.

We should kill off the one teacher per class model. It is fraught with emotional risks.

Students should be given capacity to delve deeply into topics, not punctuated by factory-style bells. Schools need to experiment with far more timetable-less days – opportunities for real life learning.

Third, vocational and academic high schools were required to design and provide instruction that enabled students more flexibility and choice.

One scenario is that schools will race after technology and align core instructional operations to rely on digital and other technological solutions.

A second scenario views schools merely as places for facilitation of study and checking of achievement.

A third scenario would be to elevate schools as places for social learning and developmental skills. Cooperative learning, problem solving and cultivating the habits of mind would be at the heart of school life.

First, I am not saying that Finland has the best education system in the world and that others should imitate what we have done.

Second, I make it very clear that the Finnish school system cannot be transferred anywhere else in the world.

There are some concrete lessons that American educators and policymakers could learn from Finland.

First, a universal standard for financing schools, so that resources are channeled to schools according to real needs

Second, a universal standard for time allocation in schools, allowing pupils to have a proper recess between classes and a balanced curriculum among academic learning, the arts and physical education.

Third, a universal standard for teacher preparation that follows standards in other top professions.

“Writing exams isn’t a measure of intelligence or knowledge, it’s about getting inside your prof’s head to figure out what’ll be on the exam.”

Information is propelled into students without teaching them how to practically utilize it. This is senseless. Regurgitating facts, memorizing figures and formulas, compressing course material in our short-term memory for the sake of doing well on an exam; they are all detrimental to the learning experience. But students still do it because they don’t want to fail. Instead, we should be fostering a culture where, to paraphrase Arianna Huffington, “Failure isn’t considered the opposite of success, but an integral part of it.”

We can’t allow learning to become passive. We need to teach students to learn how to learn – to become independent, innovative thinkers capable of changing the world.

If we are truly designing a student-centric learning environment and putting the students in the position to make meaningful decisions about their education, how can we justify deciding which device they are required to learn on?