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Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

news.bbc.co.uk

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Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#61

Post by ippisl »

One of the bigger factors that differentiate between average teachers and great teachers is the ability of great teachers to give a lot of personalized feedback to every student.

Also if other fields of learning like music, sports , computer programming and others, the importance of rapid personalized feedback to learning is very big.

"in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject"

There's a reasonable chance that the most of the advantage of the finish system comes from this method of teaching.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#62

Post by enjo »

maxklein wrote: post #29

They may get the best results, but there are a lot of contributions to society that have come from less educated people. A lot of great athletes, musicians, inventors, generals, etc, have come from societies where the average result is not so high. Finland may have a high education level - but I could also make the claim that Finland is boring. If everyone gets educated the same, then everyone turns out the same and…

I'm sure neither of us are going to be receiving a lot of upvotes, but I don't think your completely wrong.

I've spent a fair amount of time in Finland working with various teams at Nokia. While Nokia obviously does a lot of things right, their decision making always baffled me. Watching Series 60 evolve was just baffling. They're emphasis on consensus around decision making led to all sorts of 'designed-by-committee' products built right into the core of S60.

For example, S60 had an app-store long before the iPhone. It was a usability nightmare. It had different 'catalogs' each mostly selling the same stuff. Navigation was nearly impossible. You where dumped into a home screen with no real affordances. The whole thing was just a nightmare. It was that type of decision making and general lack of forward thinking that delayed the launch of the touchscreen S60 phones for years. When they did hit, they where far away from the iPhone in a lot of ways.

It was really no wonder that iPhone leap-frogged them so effortlessly in terms of usability (and has taken a big chunk of their market share as well).

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#63

Post by drunkpotato »

hugh3 wrote: post #57
drunkpotato wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement is glib and unproductive. Obviously there are advantages to homogeneous societies. There are advantages to heterogeneous societies, which the U.S. is a pretty good example of. The point is not which is "better", but what lessons can we take to improve the things in our society which are deficient? Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what w…

Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what works. Unfortunately, it's tricky to run experiments in education, because of political considerations and largely because the result has real effects on people's lives, but it's what needs to be done to improve. Or perhaps we need to do things which it is intuitively obvious should work, but which there is curren…

The problem with your intuitionist approach is that you are myopically focusing on some issues without proposing any real solutions. You are not proposing a path from here to there.

Fire bad teachers: good idea, but you need to train and attract good teachers at the same time. How do you do that? Teaching is a badly overeducated, underpaid, and under-respected profession in the U.S.

Doing more to stop student truancy: This is cultural. Put armed guards to stop the students from leaving, and they don't show up in the first place. We need to foster a culture such that school isn't simply a prison students are coerced into going to for 9 hours a day.

The path from here to there is difficult and there isn't currently any money in improving education, so there isn't any political will either. It's a lot more difficult problem than your simplistic world view admits.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#64

Post by btilly »

r7000 wrote: post #56
sesqu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada and Finland are culturally far more similar than the US and Finland. Both are also bilingual, northern, woodsy and even share some genetics (Finns mostly migrated to Canada, Michigan etc. way back when that was happening).

When it comes to cultural homogeneity Canada and Finland are not at all more similar than Canada and the U.S. - which was the issue here. Perhaps the Canadian and Finnish educational systems have more in common than with the U.S. which may have been your point. Does being officially bilingual, northern, and woodsy have an impact on PISA rankings? Finns do not make up a large or even a moderate proportion of Canada's…

As a dual US/Canadian citizen who grew up in Canada, I absolutely agree with you. There are cultural differences between the USA and Canada, but they are much less than the cultural differences that I've experienced between different parts of the USA. And I'm not sure that growing up I even met anyone with Finnish ancestry outside of my own family.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#65

Post by radu_floricica »

yardie wrote: post #20
lotharbot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed what I think is the key point: 5. instead of making a big deal out of kids being "behind", they recognize that everyone learns at their own rate. Kids don't get labeled as "dumb" or "incapable", they just keep being taught.

^^^^^ As a parent you'd be amazed at how many people think their kid is special because they can do one thing that other babies at that age don't. Things like, "He walked before other babies","She started talking at a few months","She eats normal food and can hold a spoon". My wife fell into this trap when kids his age were walking or talking and he was just scooting along. I told her I'd worry about it if he's still…

It's the difference between precocious and smart. Just reading the dictionary definition is enlightning - there is nothing about extraordinary capability there, only about normal capability unusually early.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#66

Post by hugh3 »

One thing that shouldn't be forgotten in all the handwringing about the US educational system is that the US still has by far the best universities in the world. Whatever ranking system you look at, US universities dominate the top of the leagues table (along with a few foreign universities like Oxford, NUS and the Ecole Polytechnique). While there are many reasons for this, it seems like crummy performance in a few primary-school level tests certainly isn't crippling the entire education system.

For what it's worth, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranks the University of Helsinki as Finland's best university, in 108th place equal with UC Davis. Still a pretty impressive showing for such a small country; among the small (<10m) countries only Israel, Ireland and Singapore have entries in the top one hundred.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#67

Post by r7000 »

btilly wrote: post #64
r7000 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to cultural homogeneity Canada and Finland are not at all more similar than Canada and the U.S. - which was the issue here. Perhaps the Canadian and Finnish educational systems have more in common than with the U.S. which may have been your point. Does being officially bilingual, northern, and woodsy have an impact on PISA rankings? Finns do not make up a large or even a moderate proportion of Canada's…

As a dual US/Canadian citizen who grew up in Canada, I absolutely agree with you. There are cultural differences between the USA and Canada, but they are much less than the cultural differences that I've experienced between different parts of the USA. And I'm not sure that growing up I even met anyone with Finnish ancestry outside of my own family.

Actually two of my friends ended up married to Finnish-Canadians: one from a Northern Ontario family (Thunder Bay) and one recently from Finland. So if we go by personal anecdote Canada is indeed full of Finns. :)

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#68

Post by hugh3 »

drunkpotato wrote: post #63
hugh3 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what works. Unfortunately, it's tricky to run experiments in education, because of political considerations and largely because the result has real effects on people's lives, but it's what needs to be done to improve. Or perhaps we need to do things which it is intuitively obvious should work, but which there is curren…

The problem with your intuitionist approach is that you are myopically focusing on some issues without proposing any real solutions. You are not proposing a path from here to there. Fire bad teachers: good idea, but you need to train and attract good teachers at the same time. How do you do that? Teaching is a badly overeducated, underpaid, and under-respected profession in the U.S. Doing more to stop student truancy…

there isn't currently any money in improving education, so there isn't any political will either

That was my point, these are two examples of ways in which education which can be solved with political will alone rather than requiring complicated new research.

Teacher salaries aren't as low as often assumed, by the way; the average teacher's salary in the US in 2006 was a surprisingly respectable $51,009 (with all sorts of perks) which, while no path to riches is certainly a ticket to a good middle-class lifestyle, especially in a two-income household. I personally wonder if part of the low attractiveness of teaching as a profession can be attributed to the fact that teachers' unions spend so much time whining about how low teachers' salaries are.

You don't need to put armed guards to stop 'em leaving, you just need to make sure they're punished when they don't show up. I never once played truant from my school; not because it was such a fabulous caring-sharing environment that I never wanted to leave (this is impractical, children will get bored at school) but because I knew if I might get caught and if I got caught I'd be punished. Now for me personally, the threat of detention and having my parents find out was a scary enough punishment, but I realise that this won't work on every kid... which is why I strongly believe that every school needs a form of punishment which every kid is afraid of; and if suspension won't do it for some kids then we need to bring back the cane.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#69

Post by sesqu »

r7000 wrote: post #56
sesqu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada and Finland are culturally far more similar than the US and Finland. Both are also bilingual, northern, woodsy and even share some genetics (Finns mostly migrated to Canada, Michigan etc. way back when that was happening).

When it comes to cultural homogeneity Canada and Finland are not at all more similar than Canada and the U.S. - which was the issue here. Perhaps the Canadian and Finnish educational systems have more in common than with the U.S. which may have been your point. Does being officially bilingual, northern, and woodsy have an impact on PISA rankings? Finns do not make up a large or even a moderate proportion of Canada's…

Does being officially bilingual, northern, and woodsy have an impact on PISA rankings?

If I had to guess: yes. I honestly do believe that winters and environmental controls (like pavement) affect your approach to a wide variety of problems, and are immersive enough to do so on a nationwide scale. Not so sure about language, but a lot of other people seem to be.

This might manifest in educational systems more prominently than other parts of culture, or it might not. The thread of discussion is mostly about why the US is feeling inferior to Finland in one particular aspect, and grandparent stated that Canada also tests better there, so I would figure there might be something that Canada and Finland have but the US (and UK?) don't. Like, say, some aspect of culture.

Although obviously bordering cultures tend to affect each other greatly, my first instinct is always to look at a nation's climate.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#70

Post by yellowbkpk »

hugh3 wrote: post #58
yellowbkpk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the bureaucracy got bigger, wouldn't it cost more? More levels of management, more paperwork, more time spent on oversight. I don't think the cost/size relationship in any government is linear.

But education isn't handled at the Federal level in the US (and to the extent that it is, it damn well shouldn't be).

It's handled at the state level. According to [0], Finland has roughly 600,000 students in what we might call K-12 and according to [1] almost all of our states each have at least as many students individually and most have more than double.

(Not sure what my point was, but it was interesting to find the data :))

[0] http://www.stat.fi/til/opiskt/2007/opiskt_2007_2008-01-25_ti... (Basic comprehensive school education, compulsory education school)

[1] http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-26.pdf (adding elementary and high school columns together for K-12)

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