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Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school.

more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations

“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,”

There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.

Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.

The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

“If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschoo

Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.

The only time Rintola’s children are pulled out is for Finnish as a Second Language classes, taught by a teacher with 30 years’ experience and graduate school training.

English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth.

Not until sixth grade will kids have the option to sit for a district-wide exam, and then only if the classroom teacher agrees to participate

Most do, out of curiosity. Results are not publicized. Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,”

“Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

A class of first graders scampered among nearby pine and birch trees, each holding a stack of the teacher’s homemade laminated “outdoor math” cards. “Find a stick as big as your foot,” one read. “Gather 50 rocks and acorns and lay them out in groups of ten,” read another. Working in teams, the 7- and 8-year-olds raced to see how quickly they could carry out their tasks.

“We help situate them in the right high school,” said then deputy principal Anne Roselius. “We are interested in what will become of them in life.”

“It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive.”

Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions.

The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers.

Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive

All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind

The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”

A recent report by the Academy of Finland warned that some schools in the country’s large cities were becoming more skewed by race and class as affluent, white Finns choose schools with fewer poor, immigrant populations.

Cultural literacy: Cultural literacy has always been a desired skill in teachers abroad and living in multiethnic domestic regions.

Socratic seminar:

Community engagement:

Information literacy: Seeing as how information literacy is considered integral to student success, schools have little use for teachers without the relevant skills.

Networking: A networking teacher is, ostensibly, an open teacher.

Coaches are not teachers, but they teach.

Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention.

The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction

Doctors understand expertise in the same way.

We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.

Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.

Coaching in pro sports proceeds from a starkly different premise: it considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection.

“My wife always says that I don’t really know how I play,” he told me. “She is an extra ear.”

The professional singers I spoke to describe their coaches in nearly identical terms. “We refer to them as our ‘outside ears,’ ” the great soprano Renée Fleming told me.

Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires.

So outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes

For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.

Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores.

alifornia researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools,

Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time.

But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent.

Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

One thing that seems clear, though, is that not all coaches are effective

Researchers from the University of Virginia found that many teachers see no need for coaching.

Novice teachers often struggle with the basic behavioral issues.

Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components

It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.

She told me that she had begun to burn out. “I felt really isolated, too,” she said.

The coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is,” she said.

Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice

I’d had no outside ears and eyes.

Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down.

Coaching has become a fad in recent years. There are leadership coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, and college-application coaches

The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate

We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.

But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology.

What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology.

We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.

The prospect of coaching forces awkward questions about how we regard failure

But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I’d let him see that I may not be who I want to be.

Your performance is not determined by where you stand or where your elbow goes. It’s determined by where you decide to stand, where you decide to put your elbow.

“Most surgery is done in your head,”

we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance