In a new book, an American teacher in Finland collects the best teaching practices of the world’s most lauded school system.
Source: How to Bring Finnish-Style Teaching and Learning to Your Classroom
In a new book, an American teacher in Finland collects the best teaching practices of the world’s most lauded school system.
Source: How to Bring Finnish-Style Teaching and Learning to Your Classroom
Extensive training is the basis for giving teachers the autonomy to work the way they want. The result is a highly prized profession and an education system always near the top in international rankings
Source: Highly trained, respected and free: why Finland’s teachers are different | Education | The Guardian
As a teacher in an inner-city school, Lucy Crehan was exasperated with ever-changing government policy claiming to be based on lessons from ‘top-performing’ education systems. She resolved to find out what was really going on in the classrooms of countries whose teenagers ranked top in the world in reading, maths and science.
Cleverlands documents Crehan’s journey around the world, weaving together her experiences with research on policy, history, psychology and culture to offer extensive new insights into what we can learn from these countries.
Perhaps we’ve all been there. Getting swept into the world of internet and its infinite-appearing sources of information and media for countless hours – while the rest of the world awaits. Due to their ease of use, availability and cost-effectiveness smart devices are these days de facto method when connecting to multitude of sources and people.
But it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, as is evident by an article e.g. from The Sydney Morning Herald titled ”‘Schools need to react quickly’: Education expert urges smartphone ban“.
Let’s inspect the smart device phenomen more in depth.
For some students smartphones and tablets offer a way to shield oneself from the noise of the classroom. One may even escape reality. Additionally, listening concentration music while carrying out an assignment appears common. Some just play games during a lesson for the fun of it. There are certainly times when teaching…
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One of the most recurring ideas in teaching concerns the role of students and teachers. Progressive teaching methods advocate student-centric approaches, whereas traditional models promote teacher-led teaching. Which one works the best?
Having read an article in Education Week, in which a teacher with 29-years of experience criticised overusing student-centric methods in teaching, I decided to tackle this topic. The article makes several claims about what happens with regards to teaching when students are put to the driver’s seat (marked in bold). In italics you’ll find my reflection on the claims.
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Easy-to-implement classroom lessons from the world’s premier educational system.
Finland shocked the world when its fifteen-year-olds scored highest on the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a set of tests touted for evaluating critical-thinking skills in maths, science and reading. That was in 2001; but even today, this tiny Nordic nation continues to amaze. How does Finnish education with short school days, light homework loads, and little standardised testing produce students who match the PISA scores of high-powered, stressed-out kids in Asia?
When Timothy D. Walker started teaching fifth graders at a Helsinki public school, he began a search for the secrets behind the success of Finland’s schools. Walker has already written about several of those discoveries, and his Atlantic article on this topic received more than 500,000 shares. Here, he gathers all he has learned and reveals how any American teacher can implement these simple practices, which integrate seamlessly with educational standards in the United States.