Finnish Lessons: What the World Can Learn from Educational Change in Finland

well good evening people how are you you know I I only hope that my grandmother would see me now here you know being a privilege to address people in the great University of Harvard is something very special thank you very much for having me here this is a great great honor really for me to have all of you here this this evening I'm also very happy to have some some finished colleagues here my cousin Hugh hanging nuts you see you see I'll tell you a little bit later why he is travelling with me and I we also have mr. SEO aho here sitting in the front seat he is the senior fellow here in the Kennedy School and ESCO is a very special person also in the history of Finland because he was a youngest prime minister in Finland just before we went entering the European Union in the early 1990s and I am sure that there are several parts of my story of Finnish education that he remembers and knows much better than I do so if you if you want to correct something that I I miss explain here please do so how many teachers do I have here this evening okay how many students wonderful ok how many of you have been in Finland wonderful how many of you would like to visit Finland everybody you know somebody said to me in a meeting like this are there two types of people in the world they have fins and wannabe fins right okay let me let me make two two notes here before I start that are very important the first one is that I I didn't come here to try to convince you that Finland has the best education system in the world that you often read in the media you know this this is what we hear often in Finland people come to see us and say that we wanted to we want to see the best education system in world and I think we should not think like this at least Finn's don't want to see themselves and their own work like this and Bob was mentioning the the OECD piece of work I think the the evidence that we have to compare whole education system systems is really too little if you use the OECD Pisa or Tim's or any of these studies that we have you can say something about the school systems or education systems but you certainly cannot say that one education system is better than the other one just by relying on these evidences so I'm not trying to convince you that finns have discovered the best education system in the world the other one equally important that i'm not trying to do here with you is to try to convince you that if you only do what the finns have been doing during the last 30 or 40 years everything will be fine here in the great country of the united states of america it doesn't work like this but i'm here to tell you the story of what we have been doing and i'm I'm a very strong believer of learning from one another you know it is this one thing that finns have been doing very well in in building the school system is that we have been very good learners and we have been particularly good learners from you from the the american educators and researchers and innovators so thank you very much for all these ideas i think without the american inspiration we would not have the school system that we have I often say that most of these classroom innovations and ideas that we have that you can see in Finland are from this country yeah we have our own research and development innovation work but not to the point that would have helped us to do what we have been able to do and that's why I think if we can learn from other countries then also I think the United States can learn from not only from Finland but many others to find a way to have a school system that you all deserve okay how is my English so right you know in Finland we speak several languages we have two officer languages Finnish and Swedish so I can speak Finnish too for you if you want and then most people study two foreign languages in school so most Finnish people they speak about three or four different languages and that's kind of a it's a kind of a diversity that we have in my country all right let's go I'm here with my cousin uhaah and we came here because our grandparents have been here before us this is our grandfather and I would like to dedicate this create opportunity to talk to you this evening to our grandfather aina who in this picture he's 19 years old he was one of those many who left Finland he left Finland in the spring of 1914 so 99 years ago and came to New York to look for education work that time Finland was part of the Russian Federation and life was not always very good to young people like him he was afraid to to be sent to the Russian army and fight the wars the first world war started just few months later when he left then Finland became independent in 1917 and he he came back to see his old father and some of the relatives living in a new newly born independent state and then it happened that sometimes happened you know that you meet a person and you fall in love you get married and then you HUS mother came and then my father came and the rest is history but you know if the stars would have been in a little bit different position I could be one of you right listen to somebody else from Finland to tell the same story and you would be esker would be here anyway so that's that's one of the things that we and I remember cran fathers stories about this country he remained the American citizen until mid 1930s and he always spoke very highly about the education about this country and people and he had a huge respect on what this country has been able to accomplish so I'm also conveying a part of the credited to do this this wonderful nation this is another one this one is a nourished grandfather so this is our current father's grandfather and and part of the story why we are here today where we came came to the United States and why you guys with me is that we are going to see where he went you know he he left Finland in 1839 and traveled around the Latin America the Cape of Good Hope all the way up to Alaska Sitka that was part of Russia that time okay so he left Russia and nine months later arrived in his home country but on the other side of the planet and so we gonna call to Sitka tomorrow to Anchorage to see where he went in 1819 sorry 1840 in the spring and we're gonna meet some people there who will help us to see what happened the Sitka was a small it was a capital of Alaska about five hundred people living there and we are the first ones in our family to go back there and see the sights ourselves so it's this evening is dedicated to this great and great grandfather's of ours my first question to you is that I often ask when I have a chance to speak to people who want to go to Finland but have never been there is that what do you think when you hear the magic word Finland if you close your eyes and you just let the image these pictures come what is the first idea that you have in your mind just tell me snow okay anything else but snow reindeers forests something else sonar good cellphones we used to have Nokia and ESCO still has a Nokia yeah okay you know it's very interesting it doesn't matter where I go even if I go to Sweden that is our Western neighbor people always say reindeers snow and something like this yeah and I I think this is very important because you know if people have the images of Finland or any other country but in this case Finland something like this that you have a lot of reindeers and you have forests and you have snow and ice and you know there are many people by the way who think that Finland is always like this 12 months a year 24 hours a day is always like this Sun never shines and then there are some people who come to me and said aha now I know why Finnish kids are so good in education and it is International Studies of peace and other things because it's always like this you know there's nothing else to do you go to school you stay indoors whole day and study and learn things then you come back home you cannot go out and play football or baseball all these things you study you do homework yeah but those people who have finished friends or who have been in Finland know that this is not the full story but we have to we have to copy all these images and and look at some of the things that many people don't know about my country and this these are always things that are interesting to see that what what the country really looks like there many other things related to these images and beliefs that people have but I don't want I could get into this I want to show you five things that you probably don't know most of you don't know about Finland but the things that are very important describing the culture and the context of Education before we can make any sense of why Finland has been doing education as it has okay I think that we have to understand the certain aspects of the culture and the country and the people before you can answer the question that why Finland or why any country is doing in education as it has one of the most interesting things as the Finland has never aimed to be number one in education I often meet people who say that they think that Finns are so good in education because they have had a kind of aggressive strategy to beat the hell out of everybody else yeah and we have just been successful because we are small and rather homogeneous less than six million people and remember it's always ice and cold and dark outside so it's easy to fix your school system when you have these very funny conditions over there but you know when I travel around the world this is a typical example of a Minister of Education when I asked that what your go away where you are heading to what is your dream in education many countries now they have a dream or they have their objective to be number one in the world or among five best countries in the world okay this country is one of them right I haven't seen any American strategy would say that we want to be number 12 have you or even that American school system will be number 5 in 2020 you know if you're in a business of setting your national calls like this there's only one way in America to say that we want to be number one and I think that's your problem because as soon as you start to compete against other countries you start to create policies and kind of implement these plans that lead to all these competition related things and testing and you because you want to know whether you are getting there okay but if you look at how Finland has been doing the same thing during the last forty years and and and during the leadership of s kaho here in the 1990s this was exactly the same line of thinking that we have always wanted to have a good school for all of our children so this this is another good example of the great American ideals of equal educational opportunity for everybody starting from Jefferson all the way through yeah except to that here yeah but this is this is how we think about education that we want to have a good school for all of our children regardless of where they live and where they come from okay and it's again a very different type of implications if you have a minister a leader who who has this type of tree or goal of course this this Minister here will think about all children learning what type of support we need for kids so that they can be successful how can we help teachers to do their best and many other things and this is exactly how we have been thinking about education throughout the the last 40 years really it's a very two different very very different paradigms but make no mistake that Finland has not been in this race of kind of a global competition to try to be the best country in the world there's probably only one country in the world that we want to beat and that's Sweden and I want to tell this story because I think s caja was a prime minister in Finland when our Minister of Education went to see her colleague in Stockholm I don't know if you know this story but there was a meeting in Stockholm where our Minister and Swedish Minister of Education had a meeting and what happened in the meeting was that the Swedish Minister was giving a long presentation to our delegation of how Sweden will be the number one school system when the OECD publishes the first 2000 piece of results and our ministers response was that thank you very much this is all very interesting in it and we think we wish you good luck in your efforts to be number one but I can tell you one thing that in Finland alcohols are much more modest than yours because you see in Finland for us it's it's enough to be a head of Sweden and of course this was the kind of a entertaining comment the funny thing was five years later when when this thing really happened that we were able to beat our - your neighbor in the West the second thing is that now we come to the Finnish people's understanding of their past and history you know Finland will be hundred years old in about three years time so it's a fair thing to ask question that so what did we accomplish what have we done during the last hundred years and our colleague who was here yesterday dr. peel a bit ersity was leading a big research project few years ago that asked among other things from people in out of people in Finland that what do they consider as the most important accomplishments in our independent history okay and here are some of those things that you will see you see a couple of wars that we were able to not necessarily win the war but almost we were able to peel the welfare state and Finland was the first country that issued the full political rights to women to stand in election and boat but 75 percent of those who responded that the this study mentioned free public education I don't know any other country in the planet where people would great public school free public education and in Finland all the education is free including higher education universities people Finnish people never pay for their kids or their their own education but this is how much people value education when anybody says that education is important I said ask your people how highly they rate the building this school system that you have among all the other things I don't know here in the United States how would the list of 5 most important accomplishments look like but my guess would be that your public school system is not among those 5 right you have things like sending men to the moon and having Miles Davis in this country and many other things but not probably public education the third one it's a little bit similar thing but equally important and this is about to what extent people trust public school system in public institutions in Finland so this is what our government is regularly asking taxpayers how much they can rely and Trust on public institutions and I'll show you the top five here and you will see that we have two public institutions that are on the top of this list we have police in Finland and public school ok about 90% of Finnish people say that they trust they can rely on public institution called school and university yeah do you know what is the rate here in the United States if you ask people how many people trust the school system it's 29 percent yeah so think about the difference so that's where Finland and the United States are very different you know people can in general in my country we can trust and rely on this institution called school we can trust what the teachers and principals are doing in the school and then many of these questions that you have you are struggling here like accountability and control and testing and data and all these things get a very different meaning in Finland because we can we can do many of these things that you have to establish systems by trust simply saying that we trust them they are doing right things ok then the fourth one is again something that I'll show you how we are very different I'm looking at the how the wealth is distributed in different countries in comparison with the educational performance you know it's an interesting question intellectually to ask that is there any correlation between income inequality in other words how the countries distribute the wealth among people and how well kids are doing in the school system okay and now because we have we have the the OECD data for example we can use the OECD Pisa data here and we can look at the from different sources how the the income is distributed I'll give you the the average of these two variables over there and ask you the question where do you think United States is here where would you put your flag this way or that way so you have more inequality this way and more equality this way so this way right okay let's see that's why the United States is its one of the most unequal nations in the world there's only one country that I know that has more inequality in terms of income distribution and that's Singapore okay and I read somewhere just a couple of days ago that inequality in terms of wealth distribution in the United States today is as it was in 1774 so United States have never been so unequal in terms of reach some gap between rich and poor that it is now okay what do you think think Finland is okay that's where we are very different you see we have a relatively higher performance in in our schools in our school system and Finland is still fairly equal in terms of wealth division okay and here are some of the other countries these are not all the OECD countries that give you about 22 wealthiest nations in the world and this is how herbs this is how the the correlation between the income inequality and educational performance looks like so this is kind of indicating that when your equality gets worse it becomes more difficult to maintain the high-quality producer high quality school system okay and in the in the work that I have repaired here the wilkinson pickets the spirit level book is a wonderful source of evidence also how inequality influences everything not only education but many other things in our lives and that's why if you are seriously in education reform business we have to speak about things like this as well like we know very well in Finland and lastly the last thing here is that if you look at the Finnish performance in Eric in a society as a whole I'll give you some examples from the international rankings and comparisons that you can easily find if you go to the Google or Yahoo if you wish whatever you want to use and just type international ranking or index or something and these are the things that you will see all of these things that you see here are from the serious trustee institutions like World Economic Forum and always see the United Nations and other other things and I'm comparing here Finland's performance in what I consider being important areas of our lives like economy technology innovation equality equity health many other things including the how we are empowering women in our societies to the United States and you will see that Finland is doing fairly well in all of these messes so why do I show this to you simply to argue that maybe it's just a normal thing that education will also do very well if the country is doing fairly well in many other things right that maybe there's no miracle in education in Finland just just a part of the the overall high-performing country let me take here two things and now I'm doing this also because ESCO aho is here the World Economic Forum recently just a couple of weeks ago ranked Finland as the most network ready or technologically advanced country in the world number one okay how many of you know a thing called Angry Birds almost everybody yeah I know that you play Angry Birds but you don't want to admit it yeah it's a kind of a nice thing to do okay so now when you go home from this format if you don't learn anything else you can go and tell your husband or wife that you know honey I learned that Finland has Angry Birds yeah let me tell you another thing that you can learn if you look at this thing here the United Nations claims that Finland has some of the happiest people in the world sometimes it's difficult to believe but that's what the evidence says that we are the happiest people in the world after Denmark okay any Danish people here okay that's all right but now when you go home you can say that you know Finland has Angry Birds and happy people yeah I was speaking another country some time ago and when I say that Finland has Angry Birds and happy people there was somebody in the audience who say that we have happy birds but very angry people because of the bad state of our education system over there you probably remember there was a the Newsweek magazine published the story two and a half years ago simply asking the question that what is the best country in the world and when you read the story you don't have to go too far and you see that the best country in the world is that's right it's Finland okay but listen to this when the when this issue was published in the 17th of August in 2010 somebody was reading this and figured out that in one of the indexes where the maximum score is 100 points that was education Finland was awarded 102 points out of 100 so the simple mathematics if you take these two points away lead to the situation where the Switzerland is the best country in the world and Finland is the second and there were two phone calls to to Newsweek magazine asking for recounts and correcting this bad mistake do you know where these phone calls came from Stockholm Zurich no they both came from Helsinki from two of our newspapers they said that you have made a mistake and you have to correct can you believe this and next day the other newspaper published the big editorial saying that the everybody thinks that Finland has a Pisco Finland is the best country in the world except the Finns yeah so that's how much we rely on ourselves this is how the USA Today wrote about a year a little bit more than he recorded if you want to live the American dream you have to move to Finland yeah and remember this is not this is not the Finnish maggots their newspaper this is American newspaper so you know we Finland is not behind of this kind of a hype of elevating our country as in the lime lime lights of the of the world whether it's education or something else it's somebody else's work and I must say that many people in Finland feel quite nervous about this thing because we care more about how we are able to serve and help our own people and provide good education while it's a good life and safety for our people but you know if we are in this situation what can you do so now my question to you is that what do you think what do you think is behind this can we explain somehow that this small country like Finland that has been able to do so many things right that we are performing so well in many of these areas including education and I think we have we have two principal options one is that we have we have had a similar type of policies and similar type of implementation that most of the countries have but because we are small and rather homogeneous and because it's always dark and cold outside in Finland we have just been luckier than everybody else to get there all the other one is that we have maybe we have had very different policies and very different way of implementing these and that's why we are where we are and we have to look at the second this this second option okay so what Finland what is behind this story of Finland is that we have in many many ways done walked a very different pathway okay and I'm going to speak about a little bit about the education now how the country is doing these things in a different way I have in my book and in my work during the last ten years really when I have been travelling around the world and remember I was working five years and lived in Washington DC but I'm fine now and and Washington time also gave me an idea opportunity to you know really look the take a closer look at the what's going on in education so I designed this little idea called global educational reform movement and I kind of a liked it because if you take the first letters of these three words to get the word germ okay so it's like a infection type of thing and this is not theory you know when I went when I was a young passionate high school graduate and I decided to become a teacher in Finland I had two theories how to educate children but no kids okay now I have two sons but no theories anymore so as an educator I don't really believe in theories but it's an idea it's a kind of an idea that I I think will somehow help you to understand what is going on around the world so these are the the the principles and things that people in different countries seem to be following when they when they're in a business of improving quality of their school systems here in the United States or in the rest of the world and I'm going to show you how these ideas of germ reflect to the reality in Finland in other words how we have been responding to some of these things the main main thing that I can see around the world really today is the faith in competition as a driving engine of improving the change improving school systems and driving the change in other words that we are seeing more and more schools and teachers and even pupils and districts you know compete competing against one another hoping that this competition will lower the price and enhance the quality okay but in Finland we don't think like this but we believe that education is still more a business of go operation cooperation sharing networking you know doing things together and many of the observers who come from outside of Finland and write analysis about our school system say that it's amazing to see how individual schools and districts are speaking about this thing that they are educating they're not their children but our children our people and that's why we have tried to keep the competition away deliberately from our education policies really during the last 40 40 years the second one is the idea of standardization and you know this much better than most other people in the world what standardization in education means that we are creating standards and expectations for all sorts of things in our schools and classrooms and teaching and learning and curriculum and and many other things hoping that if we just raised the standards a little bit everything will be better yeah but standardization is a kind of a idea that we are expecting that everybody should learn the same things and often in a similar way but in Finland this course against the thinking that we we think is important in our schools because we rather than standardized we want to personalize individualized customized our school system for example every each and every school in Finland is designing and setting their own standards their own curriculum based on the national framework and each and every high school student in Finland has a personalized study plan okay and our legislation our lone education says that education has to be organized according to the needs of each and every child so we cannot standardize we cannot compare students through our student assessment to other students what we have to compare them against themselves and their own potential so it's a very different philosophy of Education as well because we believe in creativity rather than standardization the third one is a test based accountability and this includes two ideas again you are very familiar with this what it means accountability here means that we are holding teachers and schools accountable for students learning by employing all sorts of standardized assessments and tests to get the data whether teachers and school are doing the right thing okay and what I see around the world happening is that this more and more testing and they're stronger and stronger accountability over schools when people hope that the quality will improve and that this will solve and overcome the problems that we have in our public school systems in Finland we can rely much more trust for the reasons that I told you before okay and in actually in Finnish language we don't have word accountability in education so it's more like a business term yeah so that's why we we rather speak about responsibility in my book I offer you a definition for educational accountability accountability is something that is left when responsibility is taken away okay and that's something that you can see in Finnish schools very very clearly so again this is a very this is not not only different to the different kind of a way of doing the accountability but it's almost the opposite way of you know thinking about education and learning of children in our schools and and fourthly what I see around the world is an increasing amount of choice for parents to choose where they want to educate they where they want to send their children okay we have parental choice in Finnish school system but we are managing we are kind of a controlling it to the point that there will be more choice when children go to high school or upper secondary school and there will be less choice between schools before that but there's a lot of choice within the school okay and I think that if you have choice parental choice and educational equity and so two ends of the same continuum you cannot have both of these at the same time okay so if you have if you value parental choice if you believe that you can run school system like you run the marketplace then you have to sacrifice educational equity you have to forget it in a way okay and if you want to have more equity you have to control the choice okay so the global education reform movement is more like a kind of a philosophy of seeing school as a marketplace running running managing school likely run the corporation or market and the finish way is more like a way of you know trusting professionals building professionalism within the schools and school system again a very different paradigms okay are you with me nobody sleeps no okay that's good okay this I hope that this shows you that the you know although I'm using the colors black and white here that this the world is never black and white and of course we have standardization we have competition we have accountability in Finland and we have choice but if you have to choose the driver for your education reform what do you think is the the kind of a main driver of improvement then this is what Finland has chosen to do rather than the other side and those who are in the business of global educational reform movement have emphasised believed more on this side and then put this finished side on the kind of a secondary thing now I know that some people here are asking the question that so do we have any evidence of the term in other words what do we know about the educational performance of those countries around the world who have been infected by this wicked germ at some point and now we have to look at really the 1990s what has happened in the 1990s and early 2000 to have the for example the OECD evidence here and I'll show you this here okay so in this picture you will see the international averages from the OECD Pisa study we are looking at the math performance of 15 year-olds in different countries and what you see here is the 2000 study is the blue one this is 2003 2006 and 2009 study okay and so I'm comparing to seeing how kids in the different countries are doing in this consecutive piece of studies in mathematics and you can easily see that in the in the United States England Canada Australia Japan New Zealand and the Netherlands the countries that all have been infected in a way by this virus called germ the performance has been declining every single one of them okay so if the germ has been a right idea a right way to think about improving education there should be at least one country or maybe two that would have been improving able to improve things and now somebody says that but how about science or reading well it doesn't really change the picture at all so I can show you the same data from science and reading and the trend is exactly the same and this is what Finland has been doing we have we don't have a consistent performance during this four four p's of studies but you can see that the the overall trend has been improving okay and Finland is the example of those education systems and countries where we have been remaining immune or resistant to this wicked virus or germ that is going around the world okay so this raises a question for all of those who still believe that competition standardization choice accountability and all these things are the best ways to improve the quality of education just show them the data and has to explain this picture okay so let me speak quickly about three education policies here that we have been that I think are fundamental in behind the educational performance in Finland and the first one of them is this equity issue that I mentioned earlier okay so let me tell you one thing about equity because I'm not the English speaker so I have to learn all these terms again and we don't again in Finnish language we don't have the term equity we use the word equality and equity and equality a little bit different words and ESCO probably remembers that when we were building our comprehensive school or Perot scholar in Finland there was a lot of also political discussion about this equality or equity thing how important or how meaningful it is but in this picture what I mean by equity is that it's simply the strength of relationship between children's family background how are they're doing in the school okay and again Americans know this much better than anybody else because of your great research from James Coleman in mid 1960s Coleman report concluded that schools really don't make any difference because children's destiny in educationally is determined by where they come from okay so this means that if this is the case then this type of education system is not very equitable because it's not all not able to overcome these these characteristics and features that many children bring with them for example because of the poverty that they have in a home or lower level of education or single parenting or something like this to the school okay so if we have a more equitable school system it means that the school system is doing something and the society is probably doing something that is helping everybody to learn and you know remember that this has been a dream of Finland to help everybody to learn so if you have a more equitable school system you will see it on this side of the graph alright and if you have the school system that is equitable and where students learn well it will go up there okay so if you have a school system that is on this side of the graph and lower part it means that the the quality is low of learning and equity is low so there's a lot of inequity there all right it's clear wonderful okay now where do you think United States is here what do you mean how far what I'm going to show you is I know that 95% of you will be surprised to see this okay this is where United States is okay and most people here by the way they think exactly that America must be here in this lower left right hand corner or left-hand corner from you okay but you know if and this is from the OECD data and if this is true and why wouldn't it be because it's the OECD right it means that your public school system is doing actually quite well given all the complexities and diversity and difficulties that you have here you have 22% or 3% of your children living in poverty but you are still able to have the school public school system that is very close to the international average okay of course there's a long way to go if you want to have a high quality and high equity there's a pathway to cope but it's you know it's there many countries that are not even close to what you are okay so here are some of the OECD countries and non-oecd countries and you will see one interesting thing here and it is that they somehow these countries seem to find their place in a kind of a pathway from low-level there to the heaven yeah okay and you know heaven is where South Korea Japan and Canada are so is the stairway to heaven you know this song yeah you still recognize some of these flags right yeah I know that some people are now trying to recall their geography or school days and what was this flag okay the ways Finland do you know how Finnish black looks like I can give you a hint it's the most beautiful plaque of all it's a white flag with a blue cross okay so here this is Denmark Sweden Norway I'll show you where Finland this is where Finland was in 1972 okay and if you read my book you will find the evidence I will show you how the how the equity was a problem in Finland because we were dividing people into different types of school systems and our educational performance in International Studies was below the world average okay and now I'll show you what has happened in Finland during the 40 years in two seconds okay because you probably guess that when feeling will be somewhere here where the South Korea Japan and Canada is but there many ways to get there right so you can go straight away like this some people just right there or you can go first up here and then call there are many other ways but this is what has happened with Finland and pay attention to this flak over there so this has been the way of Finland and if anybody would like to give a little hand to the Finnish performance you can do it right away now yeah you know that they are not too many countries in the whole wide world who have been able to do the same thing okay and what is significant here is that this is really the we took the first two decades the 70s and the the 80s were really investing in equity heavily we wanted to build a system where everybody will learn we were not so much concerned about educating the talent making sure that we have some high-quality room to have a lot of high quality learning okay and that's why I'll show you some of these things that we were doing what this equity looks like what does it mean to invest and build in the system that is more equitable the first one is and this very well-known here also in the United States is that you have to have a funding system that is distributing the resources to schools in a fair way okay and we have had always we have been always very careful not to have the system that you have here where the school funding depends on the community property tax okay so in the wealthy communities you have more money and in the poorer communities here you have less money in the school we have actually tried to do this in another way around that if you have a school that is serving immigrants or poor part of the population they will get more resources more support so they can have smaller classes more teachers more resources to you know help everybody to learn so the school funding is extremely important and many people here in America say that you cannot really fix the American school system unless until you fix the funding system here but you have to have another way of allocating the resources that you have for schools I think that you're already spending more than you need for your overall school system the more important question is that how do you divide this money against the different schools and communities okay the second one is that we have you need to have a comprehensive support and help for the early childhood development okay and this is what we have been doing systematically now at least for the last 30 years to make sure that every child has right to daycare and preschool before they come to before they start the school at when they are seven years old okay and we in Finland we believe that you can we wouldn't be here where we are now if we didn't have this type of systematic way of helping and supporting everybody before they start schooling third one is the this child wealth and well-being you saw in the previous chart that Finland is ranked very high also in this this area and this goes from the early childhood development to the nine years of comprehensive compulsory education that we have meaning that we have a universal health care dental care mental services counseling in every school for every child everywhere in Finland all the time so the schools every school must have these services available for all the children okay we are providing healthy school meal for all the children every day everywhere in Finland so this well-being is a very important part of the the overall educational service in Finland and then the finally this special needs support for those who have special educational needs I speak a little bit more about this thing but unless you have these types of things embedded in your school system it's very difficult to get a more equitable public school system at all okay are you still all right yeah okay it's connected now it's going to get interesting okay because I'm going to I will speak about the second key policy which basically says that we have to invest in right things and intervene early okay just look at this data here again coming from the OECD database I have four countries for you United States here the Netherlands Germany and Finland there you can you can compare all of these OCD countries if you want to but just to keep this things simple you will see how differently we are spending our resources on children and the child here means some anybody who is 18 years younger than 18 years old okay so this blue one here is the the first six years of children's lives okay so this how differently we are allocating resources in different countries to the young children in Finland these are those are the children who are not yet in the school system okay but if you compare phenol and the united states you see that we are spending almost three times more proportionally of the total investment in children in this early years than you do okay and this is how the figure changes again you will see that in the United States this middle part is the biggest here meaning the children between 6 and about 12 when they're in a primary school and early early is in the middle school and this is the rest so countries have a very different patterns of investing in people and you know this is interesting because the American research I'm going to show you this in a minute shows that this is not really the best way to spend your money if you want to have a better rate of return for your investment but this is about the special-needs children a proportion of those who have special needs in our school system what you see here is that this is kind of a global trend in different countries showing you that the older the kids are in the school system more more we have those pupils who have some type of learning difficulties or special needs in our school system this is not only American phenomenon this is something that happens around the world that we you know things are only getting worse the older the age cohort in school gets okay which indicates that we have something wrong in the way we deal with these children and this is how it looks like in Finland so it means that we have a very big proportion of our pupils in the special needs program is in the in the early years but because we we can intervene early and we can identify those needs early on and support provide support we are able to help them so that these difficulties don't accumulate and become serious problems interesting thing is that we have as we speak here we have about one third of Finnish students in a in a primary and junior high school level school system are in special needs programs one third okay about half of the kids when they graduate in the ninth grade half of our young children have been in some type of special needs or remedial education during the nine years or ten years of study so special education is nothing special anymore at you actually special child if you haven't had any special needs because it's a kind of you're kind of a minority over there but this is this is a very important thing and many other things that we do in special education in Finland we have learned from the United States but we do certain things in a very different way one of them is that we have a much faster way of you know beginning the intervention that you have here many teachers and people tell me here that you need a painfully long time before you can start to help the child even when you realize that you know there's something that this individual needs in Finland we can do it basically right away so and that's that makes a big difference if you have to wait several months the damage is often done so that you cannot fix these things anymore so this is a study that many many people are referring in Finland as well and you know interestingly when we needed evidence in Finnish public policies about where to put our money we often refer to studies like Jim Heckman's research on rate of return to your investment if you if you are investing in people that clearly says that if you want to get the bigger return for your buck you put your money in the early childhood in the early years of education ok and this is what we have been very carefully reading and and implementing these things in our school system as well my last thing here really is to share you the story of my niece this my sister's daughter and I'm going to speak about teachers here in the end as a as a third key policy in Finland how we want to make and want to see teachers as professionals you know in this picture she's about 25 years old but when she was 19 she called me she was just leaving graduating the high school and she was a very good girl you know she had have highest grades and she was doing music and sports and all these things and she called me that spring and said uncle I have decided to become a primary school teacher and if you want to be a primary school school teacher in Finland you had to study in a master's degree program in one of our eight research universities there's no other way we don't have beats for Finland or anything like this available yeah so if you want to teach in a school the only way you can do it in Finland is to enrolling into the university master's program all the teachers must have master's degree study hard graduate and then go to work okay so this is what she wanted to do and see what wanted to have my advice how to get in because I was I was working in that university earlier and I was interviewing also many of these applicants and candidates so I knew something about this thing and I said well you know you are you have highest marks on everything you have studied math and science and music and all these things you know how to be with people you love them and so on just go there they will love you and they will take you okay three months later she came back and she was desperately crying and she said that they didn't take me and I said it okay tell me what happened and she said it well you know the first part of the entrance examination was very easy that they gave us a book couple of months before the the the entrance exam that we had to read this book by the way contains that time 7 scientific articles that were published in scientific journals that they had to read and learn by heart and they were asked 250 multiple-choice questions of all of these articles and you have to be very good to you know understand what's going on there okay but this is simply to skim off those who are not able to understand professional text yeah and then they invited the best candidates based on this test to the second part of the entrance examination that was a group task about four or five students were given a task that they had to design an activity for little children in school half an hour and then they were observed how they work in a team how they use their creativity and mind and all these things and then they had to play this activity out just like you know in front of the panel like they were children and she said you know this was easy for me too because I have three little brothers and sisters and I've been doing these things I've been planning this activities all my life and I knew that the problem was in the last part and the last third part of the entrance examination is individual interview where the candidate is sitting before the three university professors or lecturers and they ask you questions difficult questions and I said that okay there are what was the most difficult question of all that they asked you and she said that I think the most difficult question that I was not expecting was when one of them asked me that why did you come here because when I look at your grades and your diploma you could be a lawyer or doctor or businessman or whatever you want but why do you want to be a primary school teacher with these crates and I said so what did you say and she said that well I didn't have an answer to this question so I say that because my uncle is a teacher of course I love that but then she said and my mother and grandfather and many people in our family they're teachers so I think it's like a family thing you know and somebody in the panel said that is there anything anything you would like to add to this and then she made a mistake she said yeah I love children that you can't say this so then she asked when she stopped crying see ask me that so what should I do because I really want to be a teacher I want to work with children I want to help them to you know change their lives I said I'd go and work as an assistant in one of the schools here and see how the work as a teacher is like so that next spring when you apply again if you get there and they ask you the same question you can speak about it tell them how you feel about you know what being in a classroom or working with the children or working with the professional teachers and this is exactly what she did and she was accepted and now she graduated last year and I can tell you one thing she will be teaching for life she will be one of those who will never leave who will lead but never leave okay and if you think that I'm just the cherry picking you an example and try to make you emotional and cry about this step by the way many people here in America who cry when I tell the story of beara because you would just envy to have anybody who has been rejected from Finland into your teacher education program and you have by the way you have many of them in this country has 1700 different teacher education programs we have just one okay there's no no other way than this but look at this we had 2,000 applicants in the University of Helsinki we also teach a little bit and we accept it 120 last spring this spring the situation will be exactly the same about 2,000 applicants we will take 120 the luckiest ones handful of these are the this brings high school graduates most of them have been like Vera they call the school and work a little bit or do something else and come come back again because it's so difficult to get into the program so in other words what we have here 100% of this these people are deeply committed to be teachers and they can they can reflect on their own thinking and they can explain you why they want to teach what is there in the work of teachers this is driving them to do this thing okay so that's why you know a big difference that we have between Finland and the United States is that since we have this strict quality control at entry we don't need to think about things like teacher evaluation or performance pay or these things because you know most teachers are very good teachers as they are because we are not allowing anybody into teacher education unless you're really good so therefore we don't need to ask questions like how do you measure the effectiveness of your teachers we trust them and we know that they are quite good okay so I'm coming to the end of my my talk but I want to show you this one first most of you know the 10,000 hour rule right which says that some people say that with some Malcolm Gladwell's idea based actually our Swedish researcher unders Ericsson who has done this is a serious part of research basically says that if you want to be good in anything you have to practice that something for 10,000 hours how long is 10,000 hours in teachers life how long do you need to teach to be great teacher 10 years right it's about 10 years in this country you know that half of your teachers are gone before the end of the fifth year okay and this is where you have a challenge that you will never have enough people there with a long career long enough career to be on the top of their craft so one smart education policy is to try to keep your teachers there so that they can reach this eight years nine years or 10 years so that they can be feel that they are great teachers I was teacher for eight years and only in the I remember my last year in school I started to feel that you know now I think I have a sense of what it is to be a teacher okay and not alone in a classroom but also in a staff room with my colleagues other professionals so that's a very important thing so my conclusion here is that you know when I look around the world and I witnessed this spread of disease called germ my conclusion is that people are trying to do the wrong thing a little bit writer and that's not the right thing to do and I'll show you this one of my favorite quotations here a quotes from this man Sir Winston Churchill yeah he said something that is very fitting to the business of education reform he said that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else isn't it nice that you're going to get this one but it's taking painfully long time from you because you have to try all these other things before you get there yeah but you have everything it takes to get things right okay just what the Churchill was saying five things that I leave with you these are from my work and my research as well the first one is that I think we need more cooperation and less competition in schools it's a very simple thing like this second is that we need to focus more on prevention because it's a cheaper than repair and this is more true in education than anywhere else if you let things go fixing the things is much more expensive than preventing you know investing in early children early childhood like we are doing in Finland the third one is I offer you a different definition for school readiness because in this country and many other countries in the world when you speak about school readiness you you speak you look at the children and how we can shape them to be ready for school but in Finland all readiness means that how the school is ready for different children it's a completely different paradigm again so let's help our schools to be ready for different children and not insist our children to be ready for one type of school it's again a very different type of way of thinking about education that we are doing I think we need more gender equality in our politics and policies as well if we want to have more child-friendly policies and I had a pleasure to speak with with Nancy and read about this earlier today and I'm a firm believer in this that we need more women in politics more people who are able to understand why childhood and early childhood is important for also for education and Finland is one of those countries where we have a very close equal gender power or parity in our Parliament for example we have 47% at the moment women and in our government ministers it's about 50/50 if you take a prime minister who is a male at this moment we have equal number of cabinet ministers women and men so it's very important in your house you have 17 percent of women and in your Senate you have 18 women or something like this you cannot get your policies child policies right if you don't have more women who think about differently about children over there ayman and then the fifth one is that it seems like you know looking at the oecd evidence as well it seems like investing in equity will also produce higher quality and we didn't know this before Pisa and this is what the OECD is concluded concluding that the highest performing education systems are those that have high equity and high quality I cannot leave this stage before introducing yet another family member this is our youngest son Otto you know and in this picture Otto is two months old this was taken last summer okay and you know when he was about 2 or 3 months old I started to I was doing this touring and travelling here and around the world and every time I left home I went to him and you know he was looking at me with his big blue eyes and then he said that daddy don't go stay here with me and mama and you know in Finland children developed so quickly that even when they're two months or they can speak fluently finished but anyway you know I was confronted with this question of a two-month-old asking me to stay and not to go what can I say what would you say well I said that Otto when you were born in 17th of April 2012 there were 350,000 brothers and sisters who were born in the same day with you around the world and the next day another 350,000 and a day after 350,000 children more and I have to go because if I want I'm afraid that many of these children your brothers and sisters do not have anymore public school that I had or your mother had or my parents had and I think you deserve a good public school and he was looking at me and said it okay go but please come back thank you very much before know the drill we have two microphones if you have questions my one admonition is questions not speeches since we would like to get allow as many people as possible to get their questions answered and Posse in particular is really interested in hearing from students so don't be shy if you have questions please and we'll just alternate back and forth from Mike to Mike and we will start on this side if you could just introduce yourself to please hi my name is Missy I'm a middle school math teacher in the Boston Public Schools everything you said resonated I think you made a million great points one thing I wanted to ask you about was aside from some of these more theoretical differences I want to ask about curriculum and discrepancies in curriculum I know as a middle school math teacher I'm dumbfounded by this country's focus on breadth over depth and if you could speak a little bit about that as far as you know you hear about Singapore and their math curriculum is you know their books are this thin and they really delve into things more deeply and I feel like our curriculum here is overwhelming enormous yeah probably the best way to answer this question is that in in Finland as I said before that the the school is the the place where the curriculum is decided so we don't have a national curriculum that would say exactly what every school has to teach or every teacher has to cover this is a this is a responsibility of every school and every municipality to decide so we may have schools where they prepare prep rather than depth and we may have schools where where they do the opposite but I think the key point in Finland regarding curriculum in all the subjects is that it's a responsibility of teachers to decide what is the best thing for their children and that's why I cannot really say how the country is doing with this I think we are in math and science I think we are putting much more focus on applications and problem solving and investigating things that many other countries are doing and probably less focus on more like theoretical textbook based things it's true that if you compare the textbooks here in the United States and in Finland there's a big difference there we have we have many schools now where they where they don't use textbooks at all I mean textbooks that children carry with them between home and the school because they are using other types of resources but the whole curriculum question is that this this depends on how the school individual school sees and understands what is best for the children if I remember possibly the National Curriculum in mathematics grades 1 through 9 is 11 pages in other words very very light guidance to schools yeah and it doesn't specify anything what do you need to do in the 4th grade or sixth grade this is something that the teachers have to decide thank you thank you rob and personally I taught Chinese have been teaching Chinese in public and private schools in Singapore and China and us I might not realize this many Chinese teachers right now in Finland doing trainings also in school teachers from Singapore's what do you think feminist education can collaborate with the Chinese and Singapore style and something that you can share with oh so this is a difficult question really I think but I would say that we are as I said before that we Finland has been a very good learner from other countries and we we are continuing learning we are looking particularly closely what Singapore has been doing in mathematics and science as well I know that many of my colleagues from the University for example are having projects together and exchange simply to learn more what you do but you know I'm I'm probably too far away from from that practice that I would be able to answer you in detail the other thing with Finland in in this particular question is that you know we're having so many visitors in our country now that is taking time away from you know looking closely enough for the other countries whether it's China Singapore or others are doing actually we are having so many visitors that we have a thing called Ministry of Education and Culture that we have considered to change the name to Ministry of Education and tourism so many people are coming but I think we have a lot of appreciation to what Asian countries are doing including Japan in math and science and I know that many of my colleagues are learning from them but I don't know that I cannot I cannot speak more about this okay thank you I just want to add one thing do you think Finnish school is interesting have partnership schools with some Chinese or American school like with Chinese schools yeah yeah we have we have a lot of partnerships at the school level with the Chinese Chinese schools a lot actually what kind of exchange activities to do we have one ESCO say that we have one Chinese Chinese school where you can study in Chinese languages well okay thank you thanks hi I'm a student here and one of my beloved unnamed professors is fond of saying that um the ironically Finland's success might have created a situation that halts innovation because in an effort to sort of hold on to gains you don't want to tinker too much with what has worked um do you think that there's truth to that or what's your take on that I think I think there's some truth in this and you know it's this is not typical only to education the well performing education system it's typical to any situation in life when where you know people say that you're the best and you know that that has been a kind of a destiny of you know that there's so many people every week we have delegations and they come and say that you have the best thing in the world and and that's why you know if you think like this it is in a way preventing the system to renew itself like if I look at this Sweden or other Scandinavian countries when they're trying to catch up Finland there they are much more dynamic in terms of the discourse in educational reform and education policy as well because they have to change they have to improve if they want to catch up but if you're already doing well you can also think that you know it's enough for us to you know maintain and try to keep this good situation but everybody knows particularly those who are working in business well that if you have as soon as you think like this that we can I try to maintain this good good market share for example you're dead because then that's the moment when you have to change you have to come up with a new idea that may make people say wow and then you know that we are we are moving ahead of we are unfortunately not able to do these things to the point that I think should be necessary but I think he's oh she's right yeah greetings okay yes please hi I'm Bronte I'm a freshman at Brandeis um one of the things I've been wondering about I don't know how slavery worked in Finland but in America lots of people got a sort of 400 year head start on inequality in America and that disparity is very prevalent in our education system and so I guess my question is I'm wondering how many of these lessons could be applied to our system Malcolm X for example said capitalism can't exist without racism and in a place where capitalism is our main focus how much of our education system can afford to go towards the Finland way with I guess what we were talking about with equity yeah well I think Finland is an interesting case because you can you can look at these grunt lessons that I have been saying here that goes to equity and equality also in terms of gender and many other things that are big issues okay but Finland also has a lot of like a small mini lessons that you can you can take a look at and if you think that you are not able to you know do away the standardization or competition or standardized testing to the point that Finland has been doing you can always look at the some of the kind of minor things that we are doing there actually several schools I know here in the United States in different parts of the country there are some districts here who are have been interested in adopting some of the ideas from Finland and they are not a grand ideas like this one but for example simple things like let's give our children little children a fifteen minute break between math and reading lesson every day so that we are not insisting them to have a three minute transition break and then continue studying or let's reduce the homework load a little bit let's be reasonable with these things okay let's have physical education with the little children revolutionary ideas aren't they yeah because there are many I've been seeing many schools here where they don't do these things anymore and I you know you know these are direct lessons from Finland that anybody can consider and I know that many people actually my advice here in the United States is exactly this that if you want to if you want to learn from Finland you cannot change the system overnight but you can also look at the for example the the whole question of standardized testing I think you are testing your children far too much you are spending far too much money on standardized testing in this country and it's doing far too serious damage to many many people in your school system and you could do easily with much less and if you are serious about this question you can also come to Finland or many other countries around the world and see that okay it tell me how do you do this same thing so I think it's not always I am warning people to think about the finished model as a kind of an entire box that should be moved here to the United States exactly for the reasons that you said that our cultures are different and people are different our politics are very different but you can learn many lessons many things that are minor and smaller that we have been doing and I always emphasize that it's not only Finland you know there are many other high-performing countries like South Korea Singapore Japan Canada is a great example Canada Canadian provinces like Alberta for example is the highest performing being English speaking education system in the world and Quebec is the highest performing french-speaking school system in the world and they very nearby very close part of you and you will see many similar things if you go to Alberta for example the Finns are doing so it's not only Finland there many other countries that are doing the same I am I wonder as first can American teachers with the Masters apply for asylum in Finland yeah we take about three people every year I want to thank you for your voice because I think it's so desperately needed in especially in this country I read the spirit level before and it fascinates me I I think you know that our the u.s. leads so many industrialized nations in child poverty and and homicide and teenage pregnancy and drug abuse and mental illness it's it's amazing and yet it seems like we focus in our countries so much on teacher accountability school accountability educational crisis and failure and closing schools down do you have a because you're you come from a place that has such like the chart showed so much equality what's your take on that what you know I think that we lead in all these areas that are a definite crisis and yet we want to focus on schools only it seems in our debates do you have a perspective on that no I think this international evidence this chart that you saw and many others you know if you read the spirit level book the only conclusion that you get is that we have to fix many other things in our societies before we can do better in education or health or many other things that I think too often I see particularly in this country I see people who call themselves education reformers and they claim that the problem is with teachers that we have if only we get better teachers in our classrooms everything will be fine and the evidence is very clear that it's not about teacher only I think teachers are important but you only we also need to have a discourse about politics and other things if we want to fix our school systems here in the United States and any other country okay in Finland for example we are regularly having the conversation that what does it mean for the country when the inequality is getting worse and we have Finland has had one of the fastest decrease of equality of income of all the OECD countries but you know again when you start from the very equal situation it's a it doesn't show that much but people often raise this question but what does it mean for the country how does it change the society and our school system during the course of the future so we my response is that we have to speak we have to understand also how these things around education affect on what we are trying to do in our school systems and get you know get get beyond these rhetoric that it's only about the teachers or schools or curriculum they are important but teachers can only do that much quick interjection here of how these opportunities are used we honestly Finland doesn't look that that good in that area we have a lot of products we have a lot of problems with especially with boys to get so education is very critical and finally I'd like to ask you one question related with that what to do because of the fact that we can see that boys are now propping up the way which is the trend is very very scared and and we can see that in spite of the fact that the school is right to its best the fact is that this problem is getting worse Tamm today's services Danny can you imagine what can we do with the spirit because I believe that is it's one of the challenges of the school system what do you get yeah it's a great question thank you very much for bringing this along you know often in this conversations and question and ask answer systems we are only focusing on good things like what are we doing I think it's very very important also to to look at the the other side of the thing and we have you are right that we have this thing that we have increasing number of young people who drop out not only from education but the society as a whole they just marginalize and you know my response to your question is that perhaps there's nothing that the school can do as it is now for this particularly with this boys that they simply vote with their feet to the situation that the school is not able to provide any more kind of around environment for them to learn and I think that if we really want to solve this problem we can it will be very hard to solve this problem in Finland or any other country by trying to do the same things similar things that we are doing now but it's just a little bit different way it doesn't change if we change the curriculum or a number of lessons that kids have to be in school I think we have to change the whole design of the school and in my book I'm offering an idea kind of a thing where you can start to think about this thing is to reduce the number of formal instruction classes where teacher is standing there and the kids are sitting and increase the time where people can do and work with their own problems with the teams and with the things that they think that are important and meaningful for them if we do that one I think we are able to keep many more voice and many more young people in the school and learning but other than that I don't I think we have tried everything most of the things in Finland also with the curriculum and kind of back this model of design that we have tried before and it simply doesn't work we're almost out of time we have five people in line if we say we have five more minutes can we take the let's take like three three questions in a row and let's see sure let's do that great and we'll take the three from this side and then respond and then take the two from this side no all right okay yes okay hi um my name is Jana saliva I'm a freshman here at Harvard College and I'm from Finland myself I grew up there and I want to thank you for a very interesting talk but one thing I noticed when I moved here is that a lot of people who sort of just had this notion of Finland having the overall best education system in the world and and much of what we focused on today was early education and I'm wondering is the same evidence or the same data with are the same results present in for example high school education because I feel that there's sort of a danger of extrapolation there because um I myself went to UM I did the International Baccalaureate high school program and I noticed notice that we were taught a lot of critical thinking and things that are not necessarily parts of the finish high school high school model and when I was talking to my friends who'd at the national program we notice notice a really really big discrepancy there so is the same data present present in high school high school type date as well thank you Tony Tony I pass here I was going to invite you to extend those remarks around student motivation first of all what did the Finnish education system do to try to increase intrinsic motivation of students for learning and what more do you think they're going to have to do is there a changing demographic in other words our students more difficult to motivate today and how do you see those challenges okay thank you my question concerns the relationship between math instruction and multilingualism I've seen in New York City the growth of a number of programs and schools that are trying to create bilingualism in monolingual students and one of the techniques that they're using is to alternate years teaching math and English one year and teaching it in Mandarin another year having never met an adult who does math in two languages I would really like to hear your opinions about how you integrate multilingual education with a coherent math education program okay yeah well this is getting I think time is out already these are really tough but you know your question of the high school as I said before we know very little about how the high school aged students and school systems are performing around the world so we can based on evidence we can say very little about which country has better over school school system in a high school level I agree with your notion that we have we have similar knows similar issues in Finland too that we are not completely happy with the with the teaching and learning at the moment in particularly in our academic high school but there's also we spoke with Tony yesterday about the vocational track in finished high school system that is a kind of a interesting thing but we kind of really speak too much about this thing the intrinsic motivation question I think the best way to answer this is that we are trying to individualize our our school and classroom practices as much as we can and individualization making things personal always tries to go close to the intrinsic motivation in other words making sure that the kids are doing what they think is important and meaningful for them and I think standardization you know insisting that people have to do common thing is always more challenging from the point of view of the motivation thing and I think that this local this local autonomy freedom of schools and teachers to design their own curriculum and way of working is also helping them to become closer to this situation where kids can do whatever they can whatever they want to do I cannot really comment on this multilingual math teach teaching because I simply don't know too much about the fact I'm sorry about this last two questions okay so we had a long involved question but I think I've shortened it enough thank you I'm interested in teacher preparation and specifically how how the Finnish system promotes reflective practice within the teacher preparation and then also to what extent are you our teacher preparation programs bringing in the neuroscience research and looking at the neurobiology of learning and teaching in it social emotional learning and transparent way okay thank you hi I am Maria Antonietta I'm from Peru I am student at the Canadian school and my question is related to that we have these difficult problems in my country to select the mentors there are people that are training the teachers so how you face this problem in your country to choose the mentors mentors are people that train teachers initial teacher education yeah okay good you remember the story of Vera you know the educating reflective practitioners begins in that panel the question of why do you want to teach what how do you know that you are teacher is the question that begins the journey in those people who we are training to be teachers in our primary school and it continues from day one when they enter the department of teacher education in our universities that they they start to learn how to reflect on their own thinking and their own minds and their own behavior as a teachers it's not something that we give in a one course in a year for where you teach the theories of reflection and practice related to this this is integrated as part of the part of the work the you know the the question of how do we choose the the teacher educators because teacher education in Finland is within the academic University Department of Education so it means that the faculty that has been appointed to do that work other people who will be educating the teachers so Finland has a very unique situation in internationally we are one of the one of the few countries where the system of higher education includes Department of teacher education so teacher education coordination is not in a one office or one box like I see in many other countries it's a department among the higher university departments overall and those people who are the faculty of the department also training educating the teachers including the the clinical practice course that we have all the universities also running their own or the managed public schools where students are doing their clinical practice and these teachers in that school I was teaching in one of them they are part of the Faculty of Education thank you please join me in thanking Parsi for

Channel: Harvard Graduate School of Education

Views: 182,264

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Id: WeMM-hL0KFY

Length: 88min 0sec (5280 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2013