Finland's Educational Success

Saffron · Wed Apr 13, 2011 5:48 pm

I saw an interesting article on the Educational success of Finland reported in Time Mag. online. Here is a sample from the middle of the article and the link to the whole thing:

Finland's Educational Success? The Anti–Tiger Mother Approach
By Joshua Levine

But Finland's sweeping success is largely due to one big, not-so-secret weapon: its teachers. "It's the quality of the teaching that is driving Finland's results," says the OECD's Schleicher. "The U.S. has an industrial model where teachers are the means for conveying a prefabricated product. In Finland, the teachers are the standard." (See what makes a school great.)
That's one reason so many Finns want to become teachers, which provides a rich talent pool that Finland filters very selectively. In 2008, the latest year for which figures are available, 1,258 undergrads applied for training to become elementary-school teachers. Only 123, or 9.8%, were accepted into the five-year teaching program. That's typical. There's another thing: in Finland, every teacher is required to have a master's degree. (The Finns call this a master's in kasvatus, which is the same word they use for a mother bringing up her child.) Annual salaries range from about $40,000 to $60,000, and teachers work 190 days a year.
"It's very expensive to educate all of our teachers in five-year programs, but it helps make our teachers highly respected and appreciated," says Jari Lavonen, head of the department of teacher education at the University of Helsinki. Outsiders spot this quickly. "Their teachers are much better prepared to teach physics than we are, and then the Finns get out of the way. You don't buy a dog and bark for it," (I love this line, BTW this is me, Saffron) says Dan MacIsaac, a specialist in physics-teacher education at the State University of New York at Buffalo who visited Finland for two months. "In the U.S., they treat teachers like pizza delivery boys and then do efficiency studies on how well they deliver the pizza."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... -2,00.html

Charliejade · Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:29 am

Yes, I recently heard that as well and I thought it was highly interesting.

Here in The Netherlands there has been talk of that there is a sort of "zesjescultuur" going - students learning only enough to get what I would think a C-result on their tests (we work with a grade system where 10 is the highest and 1 the lowest, so they strive to get a 6 out of 10). Naturally politics looks for the cause of this problem and often compare The Netherlands to countries such as Poland, where good results are being obtained by students.

Teaching is a rather undesired employment in The Netherlands, mostly because teachers do need a tertiary diploma to teach (and a Bachelor if they want to teach what would be in the US sophomores, juniors and seniors) and it is not a very well paid job. The Dutch teaching salaries would be considerably lower in dollars than the Finnish.

I only wonder whether it has been proven that getting a MA/MSc or a PhD in front of a class will help the students get better results or make them put in a better effort.

DWill · Fri Jul 01, 2011 7:26 pm

Subject competence has to be one of the keys to improving education. I would also vote for no required education classes in order to become a teacher. Use that time instead for subject courses. Student teaching or interning gives candidates all the experience they need of the teaching field. I thought my education courses were a waste of time.

What happens, though, when highly qualified new teachers hit the schools and find out that they barely have an opportunity to give students the benefit of their knowledge? This is the case in much of the U.S. Students are poorly behaved and ill-prepared in many cases, and the school administration either provides no support or hamstrings teacher with standardized curricula and orders to teach to the test. Why would anyone put up with that crap? The result would be a quick exit from teaching. Finland probably has advantages over the U.S. that aren't confined to the preparation of their teachers.

Dexter · Fri Jul 01, 2011 7:45 pm

Completely agree DWill.

They sure didn't go into much detail in that Finland article. Do teachers have tenure? What's the public/private situation?

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