What's up with Finland?

Have you noticed there seems to be a buzz about Finland's education system? In this session, we'll take a look at some of Finland's education policies and reforms that have helped them become one of the best education nations in the world.

We will examine Finnish Lessons on:

• Formative and Summative Assessment
• Teacher preparation
• Curriculum (personalization vs standardization)
• Homework
• Equity
• Poverty
• Demographics
• Economy
• Accountability vs Responsibility
• Teach Less, Learn More
• Test Less, Learn Better

For more on Finland, check out these posts:

Paradoxes of Finland Phenomenon

Sahlberg's Ten Big Ideas on Finland

What Finland has *not* done

Irmeli Halinen on Finnish Curriculum

Pasi Sahlberg on Finland and Alberta

Accountability

Finland's Paradoxes

What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's school success

The Children Must Play

TedTalk on Finland

My slideshow:

Finland

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For more information about booking Joe Bower for a lecture or workshop, please contact by e-mail: joe.bower.teacher@gmail.com


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Marion Brady on Education Reform

Marion Brady's post on Truthout.org titled Education Reform: An Order-of-Magnitude Improvement is a brilliant read.

He starts off by challenging the conventional wisdom around today's education reforms (what Pasi Sahlberg calls GERM):

Imagine the present corporately promoted education reform effort as a truck, its tires nearly flat from the weight of the many unexamined assumptions it carries. 

On board: An assumption that punishment and rewards effectively motivate; that machines can measure the quality of human thought; that learning is hard, unpleasant work; that what the young need to know is some agreed-upon, standard body of knowledge; that doing more rigorously what we've always done will raise test scores; that teacher talk and textbook text can teach complex ideas; that ... well, you get the idea.

In similar fashion, I wrote a post titled You say you want this, so then why are you doing that? that attempts to myth-bust some of the knee jerk reactions we have towards what a good education looks like.

Brady not only criticizes today's top-down mandated, content-bloated, prefabricated curricula, but he also provides a feel for what real learning looks and feels like:

Our sense-making system - like the concept of gravity before Sir Isaac Newton - is so familiar we don't think of it as a system. And, when it's pointed out, we tend to dismiss it as too simple and obvious to be important, much less the key to educational transformation. But made explicit and put to work, our implicitly known knowledge organizer moves learner performance to levels far beyond the reach of the measurement capabilities of standardized tests, including the ones on which international comparisons are based. 

Skillful use of the system can't be taught in the usual sense of the word - can't, that is, be transferred in useable form from mind to mind by words on a page, images on a screen or lectures from a stage. Learners have to construct understanding for themselves. 

To appreciate the teaching-learning challenge, imagine trying to explain water to a fish. Success requires that the utterly familiar be made "strange enough to see." A five-hour lecture to a fish on the subject of water wouldn't match the memorable experience of being lifted out of the water for a five-second exposure to air. 

Experience is the best teacher, but attention must be paid. Adolescents, encouraged to look long and hard at particular, ordinary experiences - and to think and talk about what they're doing - eventually discover their basic, five-element approach to sense-making. They've lived long enough to have experiences they can analyze, are mature enough to examine those experiences introspectively and haven't yet been programmed by schooling to sort what they know into disconnected boxes with subject-matter labels. 

Reasoning their way to those five distinct kinds of information, they "own" the foundation of their knowledge-categorizing and -manipulating system. No reading from a textbook, no listening to a lecture, no viewing of a video production, will ever match the level of understanding of ideas that emerge from firsthand experience refined by dialogue.

For more on rethinking curriculum and lesson planning, check out this page.

Rethinking Exam Week

Lori Cullen is the principal of Erin Woods School in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She blogs here.

by Lori Cullen

One has to ponder the question “why,” on many occasions. A recent “why” has come to me this month as January is the mid-term point of the school year and most high schools are in the midst of exams that mark the end of term one. “Finals” as they are called run for three weeks. Three weeks of no classes, and no learning. When we know better, why do we do this? Why do we persist in this practice?

The ironic part is we know better. We know that high stakes, final exams that provide no opportunity for feedback or further learning are not representative of a student’s knowledge or understanding, and do nothing to further a student’s knowledge or understanding which is arguably the point of school.

Image via Wikipedia

An argument that is often launched for those who believe in and rely on final exams often goes something like this… “How will I know what they have learned, if I don’t give them an exam? How will they prove that they have learned anything at all?” To those, I offer up the following response:

1. Formative Evaluation – In his book Visible Learning by John Hattie, the effects of formative Evaluation were found to have a d = .90 or standard deviation of .90. Hattie describes this effect size as, “…a 1.0 standard deviation increase is typically associated with advancing student children’s achievement by two to three years, improving the rate of learning by 50%…” (pp 7 of Visible Learning). Thus, formative evaluation strategies in the classroom would not only give teachers information about what a student knows, but work to increase a student’s rate of learning by almost 50%.
2. Self-reported Grades d=1.44 where Cohen argues, “…an effect size of d=1.0 should be regarded as a large, blatantly obvious, and grossly perceptible difference…” (pp 8 Visible Learning). Hattie found that even without tests, “…high school students have a reasonably accurate understanding of their level of achievement… This should questions the necessity of so many tests when students appear to already have much of the information the tests supposedly provide…” (pp 44 Visible Learning).
3. Feedback (d=.73). “When teachers seek, or at least are open to feedback from students as to what a student knows, what they understand….then teaching and learning can be synchronized and powerful.” (pp 173 Visible Learning)

When assuming the reason for a final exam is to find out what students know or best case what students have learned, my question back to a teacher would be “Why don’t you already know?” I believe that if effective teaching and learning practices such as formative evaluation, self-reported grades and feedback are consistently and appropriately utilized by teachers, a final exam would simply provide them with a weak, irrelevant example of what they already know.

Hattie, John, Visible Learning A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, Routledge, 2009.

Rethinking Exam Week

By Anonymous

During this time of the year high school classes are looking extremely different. Instead of teachers teaching, they will be watching students write exams. Instead of students sitting at tables talking, they will be silent in long rows in a gymnasium. Collaboration will be called cheating as it may inflate a grade. Schools will be calculating passing grades, money for credits and unfortunately….. any teaching that does occur will have the focus of "getting through the exam" and deep real learning will be the last priority of some schools.

I would like to take a deeper look at final exams. Most classes, other than diplomas, put a weighting of 30% on their exam, and thus makes the exam meaningless for some. WHY? Let’s dig deeper, on the exams for classes that are not a Grade 12 course, to understand why….

If we look strictly at this percentage, this means that any student over a mark of 71% cannot fail the class and students under a mark of 28% cannot pass the class. Therefore only students in the range of 28%-71% should be writing the exams. Now that we have eliminated many students from the final, we should dig even further.

Most students, even in the 28%-71%, don’t need to write. As most exams are multiple choice or at least heavy with multiple choice, with 4 choices on each question, then a student, by strictly guessing, should score a 25%. The interval now becomes 28%-61%, as, only students in this range, are dependent on a certain mark on the final to determine whether or not they pass the course. I would hope that few students fall in this range, but most classes would have a few in this range. 

Now let’s look at the students who have a mark between 28%-61%. For the most part, these students are weak, having troubles with an important concept, and most likely have gaps in their learning. We now come to crossroads as a teacher, as two options present themselves. Do we take these students, who are obviously struggling with the course, and test them again or….do we teach them?

Now we should only be talking about very few students in each course, and the exam usually takes 3 hours to write. Imagine the learning which could occur with 1-1 help in a 3 hour block with a weak student? Does this same learning occur by giving them a scantron sheet and ask them to sit in a row?

I suggest that school take a look at their exam week and ask “Is this week for learning or determining who passes and fails?” If the answer is the latter, then I suggest you be upfront with your stakeholders and put a sign outside your school saying “For an entire month, two weeks during each semester, your child will not learn at this school”. If the answer is the former then the school should be re-evaluating exam week.

Why we really do need scantrons!

David Martin teaches high school math in Red Deer, Alberta. You can find David's blog here and follow him on Twitter here. This post was originally found here.

by David Martin

Most schools buy Scantron sheets by the thousands, and the cost per year must be over $1 000 as each pack of 500 are approximately $100. I was thinking that there must be other uses of scantrons other than their traditional use for this amount of annual costs. After doing some thinking I am now a believer that Scantron sheets do have a place in schools and below is a list, divided by subjects, for which you can use scantron sheets: I do apologize they are broken up by subject not grade.

Math

· Provide each student with a scantron sheet and ask them to guess which would be the correct answer to the first question, if you were unable to see the question.. Talk about the percentage of the students in the class which would have guessed correctly. Extend this to two questions and so on. You can then talk about the math behind probability.

· Turn the scantron side ways and draw graphs. A constant graph would be were all the answers were A, an oscillating graph would go ABCDCBA…. I bet there are many different graphs which could be drawn. You could then talk about slope, absence of concavity and so on.

· Using the scantron, you could create a ratio of Surface Area to Volume, or perimeter to Surface area, and so on.

· You could talk about the costs of buying scantrons and create a Cost graph and calculate the slope and y-intercept and explain what do these values mean.

English

· Have younger students read the instructions on the scantron sheet and have them explain to a classmate what the instructions mean.

· For students learning the alphabet, have them create the different letters by connecting the dots on a scantron in different formations. (“U” might be a tricky letter!)

Other languages (French, Spanish, etc):

· Have students translate the meaning of the instructions on the scantron sheet into the desired language.

Physics

· Push a marble down the floor and ask the class to estimate the number of scantron sheets, vertically, it would take to stop the marble. Increase the speed of the marble and estimate again. Extend this to the problem “How many scantrons would stop a car going 30 km/h?” (I would like to know this answer?)

· Talk about the air resistance as you drop a scantron from a desk to the floor, and then ask “Would the same action occur if this was a vacuum?”

Chemistry

· Determine how much water one scantron can hold by weighing 20 of them dry and then soaking them in water and comparing the weight difference.

· Take one scantron and light in on fire. Talk about the combustion of paper. You can extend this by dipping the scantron in different liquids and talk about the difference in speed of ignition.

Art

· Instead of using construction paper, have students cut up Scantron sheets and art with them. They can be colored on, and easily cut!

· Have them draw a picture only by connecting the dots on the Scantron.


The best part of these activities is that you don’t need a scantron machine ($5000) to do them…oh wait..you don’t even need the scantrons!!

However, if you have other activities, I invite you to share below!

Happy Marking!

Black and white

We are often provided two choices - black and white.

But most of us know that this world is rarely black and white - but that doesn't mean we need to compromise with shades of grey.

Sometimes the alternative is purple.