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Most of them have studied psychology, teaching methods, curriculum theories, assessment models, and classroom management researched and designed in the United States

Professional development and school improvement courses and programs often include visitors from the U.S. universities to teach and work with Finnish teachers and leaders.

in an ideal classroom, pupils speak more than the teacher

the entire Finnish school system looks like John Dewey’s laboratory school in the U.S.

cooperative learning has become a pedagogical approach that is widely practiced throughout Finnish education system

Finnish teachers believe that over 90 percent of students can learn successfully in their own classrooms if given the opportunity to evolve in a holistic manner.

After abolishing all streaming and tracking of students in the mid-1980s, both education policies and school practices adopted the principle that all children have different kinds of intelligences and that schools must find ways how to cultivate these different individual aspects in balanced ways.

it is ironic that many of these methods were developed at U.S. universities and are yet far more popular in Finland than in the United States. These include portfolio assessment, performance assessment, self-assessment and self-reflection, and assessment for learning methods.

Peer coaching—that is, a confidential process through which teachers work together to reflect on current practices, expand, improve, and learn new skills, exchange ideas, conduct classroom research and solve problems together in school

the work of the school in the United States is so much steered by bureaucracies, test-based accountability and competition that schools are simply doing what they must do

the right education

So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 

We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.

And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.

by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.

We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.

A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.

The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.

Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.

If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?

The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.

the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.

This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 

If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?

We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?

Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.

But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.

Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 

You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.

if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.

They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.

And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?

They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.

As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 

They must occupy their brains.

Isn’t it time for us to do the same?

which makes transformational change

ifficult

In Finland, the goals of education are explicitly linked to competitiveness, research and innovation.

nowhere in the UK do they really drive the terms under which schools are assessed.

In England, the government has defined its approach as being based on curriculum rigour.

This lack of a comprehensive statement of the achievement we are looking for schools to deliver is a key failing.

best schools

areas of high disadvantage

define the outcome they need

in the face of the complex and inconsistent demands the system places on them.

Our system should reward schools making brave decisions which focus on boosting long-term outcomes for pupils, not punish them.

It should be able to survive changes of government and provide the test against which policy changes and school actions are judged

shine the light on whether the system is truly addressing the needs of all students, rather than just the few required to meet a government target.

Focus on raising the ambition and attainment for every child as far as their abilities permit

guide young people effectively on their choice of enabling subjects…

thos and culture that build the social skills also essential to progress in life and work, and allow them time to focus on this

Have a school accountability and assessment framework that supports these goals rather than defining them.

social literacy

a range of core subjects

ncluding critically maths, English, the sciences

effective use and understanding of computer science.

‘enabling subjects’

humanities, languages, arts, technical and practically-based subjects

equip a young person to move on

o university, or to an apprenticeship or vocational qualification

a set of behaviours and attitudes,

An exclusive focus on subjects for study would fail to equip young people with these, though rigour in the curriculum does help

‘employability skills’

Behaviours can only be developed over time, through the entire path of a young person’s life and their progress through the school system.

right context at school

A supportive culture, pastoral care and the right ethos are all needed to make the difference.

a long tail of pupils failing to achieve the desired outcomes can no longer be accepted.

enable all of our young citizens to reach the desired standards.

conflicting expectations placed on schools.

renewed system should be able to judge performance against the goals based on more complex metrics.

judgement

on overall culture and ethos, teaching and governance

group of data points, including testing but also outcomes data.

Development of a clear, widely-owned and stable statement of the outcome that all schools are asked to deliver.

beyond the merely academic, into the behaviours and attitudes schools should foster

basis on which we judge all new policy ideas, schools, and the structures we set up to monitor them

Ofsted

asked to steward the delivery of these outcomes

resourcing these bodies to develop an approach based on a wider range of measures and assessments than are currently in use,

I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.

Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity.

college as a stepping-stone to success rather than a means to gain knowledge. College fails to empower us with the skills necessary to become productive members of today's global entrepreneurial economy.

36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college.

Learning by doing

A major function of college is to signal to potential employers that one is qualified to work. The Internet is replacing this signaling function.

creating personal portfolios to showcase their talent.

document our accomplishments, and have them socially validated with tools such as LinkedIn