Finland Phenominom

Today's video was a documentary about Finland and their education system.  The author of The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner went and visited many schools in Finland.  He sat and observed class rooms, spoke with students, teachers, professors, and college students who are going to school to become educators in Finland.  Newsweek ranked Finland #1 country on education while the US was ranked #26.  There were many differences that Finland has in their education system that would be really cool to try here but unfortunately I think as a society it would never work for us because it is too hard to break old habits.  The populations are completely different and there is many more issues that the US faces than Finland.  Here are some key ideas I picked up on while watching the film.

CLASS-SCHOOLS IN GENERAL:

-       Discover on their own

-       Only a few lessons a day

-       Knowledge procreation

-       Warm up and cool down in lessons

-       Introducing concepts with other resources like youtube then going back to book material

-       Music or listening comprehensions to “cool down class”

-       Teaching students how to think and engage in learning

-       Early prevention of struggling students

-       Upper secondary: education track or vocational track- 40% choose vocational

-       Very little testing

BECOMING A TEACHER AND SCHOOLING

-       To become a teacher you need high grades to be accepted into University

-       Teaching is a self esteem profession vs. US where if they cannot succeed at anything else they turn to teaching

-       3 years bachelors and 2 years of masters required

-       Teacher education: all have masters, research based education

-       While students are in school they have to create lesson plans and have them corrected before teaching and then after teaching lesson there is a review session with professor and students which is very important

-       Professors coach student teachers