a national policy exists that requires schools to avoid ability grouping of students in what was described as preventing a “dead-end education for students.”

Teachers generally teach approximately 19 hours per week. The balance of their time is focused on working with their colleagues, reaching out to families and other duties

96% of teachers are unionized

High levels of teacher education and preparation allow them to be more independent in the classroom.

Broad commitment to the vision of a knowledge-based society.

Educational equality

Education is free of charge to all, including books, meals, transportation and health care

“Our secret is investing in early intervention so that students don’t need it later.”

Sweden and Norway spend less on the front end and more later in remediation.

The principal works as a pedagogical director.

A culture of trust in which no school inspectors or national exams exist.

Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistake

The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk of tissue that helps monitor behavior, anticipate rewards and regulate attention

second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness.

subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.

new paper, Moser et al. extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly involuntary error-related signals in the brain,

scientists applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck

Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mindset

and those with a growth mindset,

subjects with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes

those with a growth mindset generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes.

increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends in performance.

When kids were praised for their effort, nearly 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles.

when kids were praised for their intelligence, most of them went for the easier test.

According to Dweck, praising kids for intelligence encourages them to “look” smart, which means that they shouldn’t risk making a mistake.

Students praised for their intelligence almost always chose to bolster their self-esteem by comparing themselves with students who had performed worse on the test. In contrast, kids praised for their hard work were more interested in the higher-scoring exams. They wanted to understand their mistakes, to learn from their errors, to figure out how to do better.

The experience of failure had been so discouraging for the “smart” kids that they actually regressed.

The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education

4 sense thinking is uncritical, episodic, and disjointed, but it is also powerful because it is taken for granted”. Thus whilst the past ten years have undoubtedly witnessed significant changes in the technological practices and predilections of children, young people and young adults, it would seem sensible to reconsider the status of the ‘digital native’ description as a prima facie account of young people’s lives in the early twenty- first century. In particular, there is a pressing need to develop and promote realistic understandings of young people and digital technology if information professionals (especially librarians, teachers and other information specialists) are to play useful and meaningful roles in supporting current generations of young people. Against this background the present paper now goes on to question the accuracy and primacy of the ‘digital native literature’ in reflecting the realities of young people’s actual engagements with digital media and technology. IMPLICATIONS OF THE DIGITAL NATIVE DISCOURSE We should first examine in closer detail the broad body of work that can be said to constitute the digital native literature1, particularly in terms of how the conditions, capabilities and consequences of young people’s technology use are portrayed. In this sense, there are a number of differing practices and dispositions that are associated with the digital native condition: i) The empowered di

8. Most Homework Is Bad: Most homework recreates school within the confines of a home. So, instead of having children do interviews, analyze a neighborhood or engage in culinary math, the traditional approach involves packets.

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.”

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.

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.

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?”

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.

You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.

Changing inertia into momentum, not waiting for someone to hand us the answer, taking responsibility ourselves rather than blaming others for our own inactivity - that’s what life-long learners do. That’s what effective educators do. That’s what we owe our children.

t’s not about us. It’s not about our personal or professional priorities and preferences, our discomfort levels, or any of that other stuff that has to do with us. It’s about our students: our children and our youth who deserve at the end of their schooling experience to be prepared for the world in which they’re going to live and work and think and play and be. That’s the obligation of each and every one of us. No educator gets to disown this.

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.