正是知己知彼百战百胜, we have always heard and admired how well the Finnish’s system’s doing, and this morning saw the article “Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?” being retweeted, and took a quick look and copied down some lines and some thoughts:
“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools
in comparison, we’ve around half that number of teachers, and 1/10 the number of schools
professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education.
i wonder which percentile of graduates is our education service attracting. we’re beginning to work towards leveling up the capacity of our teachers, but an all master teaching force is still some effort to put in.
Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student.
WOW! reminds me of juniors’ childcare centre, the intake size that is.
If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else.
哇！真的没有面子这回事的？如何塑造这种风气呢？ 羡慕羡慕
“Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,”
how “stupid” can these teachers be when they are top 10% of the graduates, and when they’re so open to consult with colleagues?
said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”
well said! we were also very much concerned about the “human aspect” and spent lots of efforts and resources on this, but somehow the feeling’s that parents/society’s only interested in the ‘statistics’ part?
There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school.
i could not have imagined how my schooling experience would be in such a system, and juniors’ schooling experience for that matter. 须要身历其境，亲身体会方可我想。
There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded.
most, if not all, of our mainstream schools are like that too aren’t they?
The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians.
looks like they have no mid-career teachers joining the profession?
Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers.
what’s the hours an American teacher’s spending? and in contrast, how much time’s our teachers spending on average?
Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests … “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.”
indeed there’s only so much those numbers derived from quantifiable stuff can tell us about our students.
(image acknowledgement: ast) 
