The Finland Phenomenon: The Best Education System (sub spanish)

[Music] [Music] Hi, I'm Tony Wagner, the Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. I recently wrote a book called *The Global Achievement Gap*, which explores the new skills all students will need for careers, college, and citizenship in this global knowledge economy versus what's being taught and tested, even in our best schools here in the U.S.

This resulted in an extraordinary invitation from the National Board of Education of Finland to consult with them as they think about their comprehensive education system for the 21st century. I accepted because Finland is the highest-ranked country in the world by any education standard, and I wanted to understand what has gotten them this far and what lessons we could learn here in this country. So join me as we take a trip to Finland to learn about their extraordinary education system.

The question that is often asked when we get visitors from other countries to Finland is, "Why are Finnish students successful?" In Finland, families value education; they think it's [Music] [Applause] important. [Music] We offer the same system for all pupils, no matter what their social background is, no matter what their parents do, and so on. So everybody gets the same, similar education. We have a consensus about what we want young Finns to be. We want to provide broad citizenship for every Finn.

There is no one reason for Finland being on top in all these rankings. I would say there are many mutually interactive factors. Politicians, principals, teachers, and universities have all understood that this is the only resource we have in Finland that has to be taken good care of: the brain, the young people, the education. So these institutions have all aimed at the same goal: to provide our kids with the type of education that makes it possible for them to compete in the international work [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] market.

So how do you go about understanding a country's education system? Well, some folks like to start with the rules, the policies, the curriculum. My preference is to start with the students and understand their perspectives, and then go into [Music] classrooms. [Music] While in Finland, I visited an elementary school (grades 1 through 6). A couple of things stood out for me. First of all, the size of the school—small. Their schools (elementary, middle, and high) are much smaller than ours because they understand the importance of more intimate working relationships between teachers and students. Class size also tended to be smaller, on average about 20. But the other thing that stood out was this particular lesson I observed where students were learning about different sources of energy, both renewable and non-renewable, in second grade. But after they'd been studying energy for several weeks, the teacher asked them to write a puppet show imagining that the power had gone off in their home and then representing what would happen—real-life experience, thoughtful concepts, and the arts integrated into one curriculum.

"What is your dream? What would you like to do or accomplish in your future? And it's okay if you say, 'I don't know' right now, but it's okay if you just have a dream, just a thought about the future. What is it that you would like to do in the future?" "At some point, be on Disney, animator—a Disney animator. Yeah. Okay, vet. A vet. I'd like to be an engineer. I'd like to... I play Ice Hockey, so if I can't play in the league, or so...so I can be... I like to own Coca-Cola. All right. Well, I have always wanted to be a musician—a musician. Uh, I just want to be rich and live in Bahama Island. I don't really know, but maybe a teacher. It would be cool to act or do something, some other things with movies and so on, or to be a youth leader—a youth leader. Okay. Um, psychologist—psychologist."

"As you imagine your future as an adult and growing up, do you believe you...you...you want...you want to have more than what you've got now, the same, less? Your thoughts?" "I think the same would be, because uh, my...we're living in a quite good standard, my family, but...and I think it's more important to...that I like my job and what I do than how much I earn money." "I agree. It doesn't matter that much how much money you have; it's like not that big a deal. But uh, as much as you need money, it's more important to me to...the love the things that I do than have the money." "Uh, I also agree with the fact you have to like what you do, but if you don't make any money, like if you want to be an actor and then you just can't get a job, that is not wise, I don't think so. So I am pretty satisfied with the situation and my fames, so more or less to say, jobs that give you much money also take usually lots of time. So if you hate what you do but get millions of Euros, it's not worth it. So less is sometimes more." "I agree too, but I'd like to be a millionaire."

We used to have 45-minute lessons, and then we used to have also these like double lessons, so we had like 90-minute lessons. They changed it because, you know, when a class starts, the first 5 minutes go to that everybody sits in place and is everybody now here? And then the last 5 minutes usually go that everybody is putting away their stuff. So now, now they told them, okay, now we save time; we just take a bit longer lesson. So we arrive at school maybe something like 8:00, but if you're lucky you can come to school later, like 10, 11. Or last year I have like...or we both had actually like almost every day from 8 till 4. But if you...when...when we now seniors, so life is much easier now. So in the next period, where...when we have only like four courses or three or three, so we have one...maybe some days we have only two lessons. We come to school at 12 and leave at 4:00, or come at maybe 11:00 and leave at 2:00. So it really depends how you do your course, how you choose them. Uh, most people do this upper secondary in 3 years, but it's also possible to do this in two or four years. So of course, if you do it in four years, that means you...you can just...yeah, you don't have that many lessons every day. In my free time, I will see my friends and uh...I...I...I fence—no, s-fighting—and then I play with my computer. And I don't usually see my friends until the weekend because then you have more time. But uh, yeah, I do sports, I do boxing or go to the gym, or yeah, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer too. Facebook is...it's just...it's very easy to get addicted [Music] to [Music] uh, hey, hey [Music] [Music] he.

So what can America learn from a small country like Finland? Well, the better comparison is actually with our states, which have substantial autonomy for their education systems. So we think it's actually interesting to compare the results from Finland with a state that has similar demographics, size, and population, and in fact was settled by Scandinavians: Minnesota. Minnesota, according to the last National NAEP test (our nation's report card), scored fourth highest in eighth-grade math scores and second highest in the country on eighth-grade reading. But what most Americans don't understand is that our best is simply not good enough by international education comparisons. So we're here to visit a Finnish school which is connected to the university that does teacher training. So what we expect to see are regular academic classes being taught by teachers who are also training student teachers.

Here what we have is the lesson plan for the math we're about to go visit with Johannes, and he outlines for us uh what...what was done in the previous lesson, which was the discovery of the Pythagorean theorem, which he just described to us. Now what we're going to apparently see is some oral calculation, proof of theorem, checking homework, how to calculate legs—that'll be interesting—written examples, individual practice, a short test of taught matter, and finally homework and self-evaluation. And it's a 75-minute class. So we're off to learn some math this morning. This is a normal eighth-grade math class—not tracked, not advanced. And yesterday this eighth-grade class was discovering the Pythagorean theorem. So in some respects this is a fairly traditional class: teacher at the front of the room, kids facing the board. But one thing that's quite different is the fact that it's the kids doing problems at the board, not the teacher. So that's the teacher's way of really trying to understand what these kids know and what they don't know. It's...it's a dramatically better way of testing their thinking than just collecting homework and grading. Behind us there are seven student teachers who are observing this lesson as a part of their basic training. They're required to observe a large number of lessons and not only just observe them but then go back and in small groups critique and discuss those lessons.

We have very little testing; perhaps, you know, we don't have practically any testing until the end of high school—yeah, the matriculation exam. Yes. The more relaxed atmosphere that characterizes classrooms now seems to facilitate and improve learning and student motivation. We...we try to all the time say that it's up to you that you learn, yes, and this is good for your future, and it's fun to learn. And so what did students have to do? You wanted them to understand this theorem. "I want to discover the...to discover it...the..." "Well, that's a really important distinction, isn't it?" "Yes. The emphasis is not so much on mechanical performance but on using math in concrete situations and sort of understanding the math." Our school system is very much oriented toward this kind of understanding and reading and also some problem-solving and these kind of things. Teachers have always been revered in Finland. In the villages they were the wise elders that people went to for advice and so on. But what is particularly striking about the Finnish story is how they have changed the nature of teaching. Teachers are no longer assembly-line workers (page 87 by October 5 in the textbook). They have become knowledge workers, working collaboratively, thinking of their classroom as their laboratory for continuous innovation, trying to understand how to ensure that all students achieve at very, very high levels. Teachers are the ones who facilitate students to create, to do knowledge work together, and this kind of knowledge co-creation happens in these learning environments today. Teachers in Finland lead this kind of multi-professional work together with those who work in libraries, science centers, museums.

If you want to become a teacher, you have to do pretty well and also you have to have pretty high marks, high grades, to be able to enter the university. And if you do well, then you might be...might be accepted. Not everybody who...who succeeds really well and has good grades, they are not automatically accepted. In a lot of countries, teaching is something that those people who can't get other jobs do, but in Finland it's a job where people apply to the teacher education and to be teachers. So it's...it's...it's an esteemed profession. Young people in Finland, they want to be teachers, and we get very competent teacher students. We have five-year study programs for all teachers, both class teachers and subject teachers. Subject teachers they major in their subject, and class teachers they major in their...in educational studies. So it's three years of bachelor's and two years of master's. IUD that it's quite rare that all teachers have the university master's degree. I think most countries don't have that. It's...it's probably a one factor, the main reasons for our success. I would say that it's teacher education that we're able to...to...that we have teachers that all have masters. We call it a research-based teacher education, and it means that it's much more important to learn to think pedagogically and be a reflective, inquiry-oriented teacher. Even if you do extremely well in both your matriculation examination and have good grades in your report card, you cannot just walk in. So you have to do well also in the entrance examination, and for that you have to study quite...quite a lot, I'm afraid, because the percentage you get who manage to start studies at the university, that's quite low in Finland. We have much more applicants than what we can take in. So teachers' profession is very, very highly appreciated here in Finland. This year there were 1,600 applicants, and we could take in only 10% of those people. But if you manage to get into the university, so you start your subject studies, they have to have a degree in these subjects that they teach. They have lessons, they have tutorials, they have small group discussions at the university, then they sit down with the supervising teacher, and then we actually start planning the lesson or lessons. They write a lesson plan; usually they plan their own teaching. We discuss it, and then they...they make the changes, they send it back to me again, and then they give their lesson. After that we have a quick feedback session with the students who have also been observing the class. These feedback sessions, they are very, very important actually. It takes a lot more time to actually fulfill one...one fulfill one lesson. So it means that the students we get in, they are very motivated and they are very, very well educated when they come in. So they are very high-quality students. Of course, sometimes we do have cases where we just have to say that, okay, maybe you should do something else; this is not maybe your...your place, but very rarely.

The beginning of the class is used as either warm-up or cool-down. The teachers talk about it in different ways, but it's a way of relaxing the kids and also engaging them. I'm also struck by the fact that this teacher has never seen this group of kids before, but his rapport and his interaction with them is just wonderful—lively, interesting, fun, but also very academically [Music] demanding. He's using very current events to actually teach a fairly basic concept. At the moment, the three questions at the top of each side: Who is this person? What is the ministry? And what is the political party debate taking place now? The student teacher just put up the frameworks for comprehensive education that was approved by the ministry some years ago, and the student just said, "Well, do you think the ministry has lived up to the promises they've made about what a good comprehensive education should be?" So now they're debating the quality of the education they've received versus what was being [Music] promised. "Whole group asked very tough questions. Yes, maybe. I think yes, but...but fortunately you have very good knowledge of the subject; not once were you lost." "What do you think about the lesson?" "I thought it was very nice. Um, I wouldn't have spoken so much in the lesson, and...and I would have given them more space, but it's a difficult subject, uh, and they ask questions all the time, so it took the time." The challenge for any of us as teachers is what Ted Caer said, which he said: Less is more; doing less, going in greater depth. Again, maybe too much talk from me, and I like to have a little bit more activity for students. "Yes, I understand also your problem that you have...you have had so much to teach that it's very difficult to cut." They observe our classes in multi-subject groups, so all those who are considering coming to the teaching practice follow lessons given by us. We just teach; we do our everyday work, and they...they follow us. "So you're really modeling the behavior or behavior being of transparency, right? You're having whole groups of kids, future teachers, come in and watch you teach." "That's true. And in part, which as I hear you say this, you're saying that this is the norm—that the norm is we're going to watch each other teach all the time. Is that a...is that a fair summary?" "The stage is open for everybody. You could drop into any classroom here and watch, and it's also encouraged before they start teaching themselves. So we have these...these observation sessions ongoing all the time, and there they're told what to be looking for—the questions that...that we have designed for that purpose. Is they are quite simple: What did you see? It could be one question. What would you have done differently? What are your thoughts about some points? Three very simple questions because we realized these three simple questions might, in a way, lead their concentration to the [Music] content."

Yeah, so this is a Swedish class. It's been taught entirely in Swedish, and this is a student teacher who is giving a formal lesson that was co-constructed, put together with the master teacher observing here in the back along with several other student teachers. The teacher trainer has sent me the lesson plan by email on Sunday. I have been commenting on her plan and ideas through email correspondence, and she's been reviewing it and sending it back. What I do now during the lesson, I have the lesson plan in front of me, and I comment on it, looking at the things she does and probably giving her hints what could have been done differently. She gets right away my comments after the class. Of course, we also discuss face-to-face after the class. She's quite well using other material, for example, a YouTube video and texts from other resources, but going back to the actual resource textbooks. After these introductory sections, John Goodlad, in his studies of high schools in the 1980s, discovered that teacher talk time comprised 85% of the lessons in American high schools across all content areas. So what are you seeing here in terms of teacher talk time versus student work time? "I would like to...to see that it would be 60% student and 40% teacher, and I'm going to give a feedback to her that every time she would have had a chance to throw the board with the classroom, she should have done it." "So can you say a little bit about why you chose that video? Why did you show it?" "The theme of this lesson was the future and what the...what these 15-year-old people are going to do after this class. They're going to high school or...or whatever. This song was quite good for to support the theme, and I've learned that it's good to...to use just music or some listening comprehension exercises or something like that to cool down the class, and I've experienced that it works. Listening comprehension exercises and music is the best way to calm down a class that is a bit...how do you say...well, not that calm. Yeah." So I've just spent the day observing classes, talking to teachers and students, and trying to better understand what is it that actually happens in classrooms that accounts for these extraordinary results. Several things we observed that were in common to all of these classes: These classes really focused on teaching students how to think, giving students a sense of being able to really actively engage in their learning, not penalizing mistakes. Finally, I was struck by the attention to detail in the ways in which these master teachers work with student teachers in their classes. There is a technique, a methodology, if you will, a national curriculum for preparing these teachers so that they get a great deal of classroom experience, they get a great deal of coaching on how to become a better teacher, and there's a clear understanding about what, in fact, is good teaching in Finland.

We have a high living standard, and um...and almost everybody can...can travel and have...have houses, and...and it's...it's enough. It was very satisfying for me to hear from my daughter that she doesn't want anything more. So I...I...I think it's good to have this and spend time on things that you like to do with people...people you love. We've had a chance to explore what Finnish students do in the classroom, but what do they do after school? Well, a ninth-grade girl and her mother were kind enough to invite me into their homes so that I could better understand how they spend their free time and their parents' perspectives on their children's work. "So you come home; how much homework do you typically have to do?" "We don't have that much." "You don't have that much homework? Yeah. And you're in ninth grade? Yeah. So do you expect when you go to upper secondary you'll have more homework?" "Do you hear from students there?" "Yes." "How much? So how much do you do now? Do you do some every day or not even every day?" "Not even every day." "Not even every day. And um...so how many hours a week would you say?" "Three...three hours a week." "Three or four hours a week." The Finnish education system—way outperforming every other country. How do you understand that as both a teacher and a parent? "A big part of it is that we take care of those children that are not doing so well at school. So we have got very qualified special education, early interventions. We...here...yes, we try to find out what's the problem behind the learning problems, because often it's something that we can avoid by teaching in a different way." "So here is our class. So we had a theme day in school. What was the theme?" "Uh, we...we are Mafia." "Yeah, I...I kind of guessed." "Also homework. I'm not concerned about that at all. I have always known that they do their homework." "I...I never check if they do." "You don't have to check." "Do you even ask, 'What's your homework?' or 'How much homework do you have this week?'" "No. Sometimes when I try to be a good mom..."

I had a chance to visit some schools while I was in Finland. The SIO school was especially interesting. We spent some time in elementary classes, but then we went over to the high school. Now, high school there is grades 10 through 12, and what is particularly interesting about what they call their upper secondary is that students have a choice between a more academic track or a vocational track. About 40%, 45% choose the...the...the non-academic, technical track because they know that's going to prepare them for a good job right out of high school. There's a respect and a dignity about all work in Finland, and what matters most is the skillfulness and intelligence you bring to whatever job you may have. "A long time ago I...I...I went to...to the Technical University and I studied uh...uh electrical engineering and electronics, and after that I have been working at different companies for 30 years. I wanted to decrease the stress level because I was a technical director in...in a company, and...and this is how I did it. I started to teach. Something I...I have learned, one...one big finding was that...that uh...uh experts don't know how people learn because there are many different understandings. So I'm trying to understand how it really happens in practice. So yeah, what I like in...in teaching is...is many things. This is demanding, a lot of challenges; you can see the results; you have long summer vacations; what else you need?" In practice, all students here may also select courses from the academic side. It's possible also in the...in the opposite way, even though not many...many are doing that. Directly after basic education, young Finns—about 45% go to vocational education training, about 50% go to upper secondary general schools. The balance between vocational education training sector and upper secondary general sector is...is very good for...from Finland, and we set a policy target a decade ago for us that...that we should actually have more balanced situation in...in Finland. Reasons behind it, there must be actually developments of...of vocational education and training sector. However, there isn't any dead ends nowadays. We have actually made our education system so...so flexible that actually you can continue studies after vocational education and training at universities, or you can actually come back to general education if you want to. So it's very open nowadays.

In American schools, technology is primarily introduced as an aid for the teachers' presentations: whiteboards, PowerPoints, and so on. But in Finland the emphasis is much more on the students using the technology for their learning. "How long have you been teaching here in the upper secondary?" "26 years. Oh, just starting then. Yeah, in...in this...that same school, 26 years. That's a long time." "So have you seen much difference in the students? Are they different to teach now than when you started?" "I think students are almost the same, but the relationship between students and teachers are better nowadays." "In what ways?" "Uh, we are working together more and more." "Oh, that's excellent." Yeah, we just had a nice 25-minute lunch in the school cafeteria, but you told me your class started 25 minutes ago. "You mean you trust them to work on their own?" "Yeah, yeah. I trust them to work alone, and they have, you know, deadlines, then they...what...what they have to do, and they have this learning environment, Moodle, and they make maps there and..." "So tell us about Moodle." "Uh, Moodle is uh...learning environment, and you can uh...put all kind of material and you can discuss and you can evaluate with..." "Mhm. Learning is something uh...to use cultural tools, mhm, all kind of tools. Mhm. If you have a lot of tools, you can learn even more. So it's like an online learning environment." It's an online learning environment where they are sharing projects with one another. Shared...everything is shared. They're working on projects together online. "You're giving them lectures online that they can access?" "Uh, no, not lectures, but you give them problems or challenges, yeah, that they have to solve." "So tell us a little bit about the class we're just going to go see." "Uh, it is uh...I think there are some 20 students, and what are they going to be working on?" "They are working um...kind of uh...geography study about African countries." "Okay, Hana, can you tell me what you're working on, please?" "Um, I'm searching some information about African land, Togo, which is..." "Mhm. How much time do you have to work on this project?" "About 5 weeks." "5 weeks just to work on this project? Yes. And you're working alone for 5 weeks? Yeah. Is that hard?" "I don't think so. It's actually...I kind of enjoy this. I think this is quite fun. I have to do something in every...every category." "Yes. Here are working on Jima nature map, and I have to make one map on paper and one up internet." "Oh, I see. So you're also having to write here um...some answers that the rest of the class will see, that will be shared from the software and other students will comment on your work?" "Yes. Yes." "Do you find this useful? Would you rather be reading a textbook and take..." "I think this is quite a good way to learn, use more of your own creativity, your own thinking, and your own ideas about how to create an effective mind map." "Yeah, exactly." [Music] "We are studying uh...uh business marketing. So at...at this moment we are staring the social media marketing, which is a quite new area, you know. No one knows where the marketing in social media is going. So uh...students are actually in the Facebook, which play...love trying to find out different kind of articles especially on...about Facebook and marketing. They are using Wikipedia. It's quite interesting because when you see something new is growing, so you need to go right to it and...and to see where it's going to..." [Music]

Innovation and entrepreneurship education came into our curricula 15 years ago, approximately. It should be included in every teaching and every subject. What does it mean to educate an entire country to develop the capacities for innovation? Finland is among the top five countries in innovation, global competitiveness, and entrepreneurship, but yet this country is now asking what I would say are some of the post-industrial questions. If education is to be something that maybe is for its own sake—to develop curiosity, to develop imagination, to develop social bonding and networks—what does that mean that we might need to do differently? How do we free up time and space for more exploratory learning—not just transmitting information, but giving young people chances to explore, to experiment, and to create new knowledge and new information? "I was 16 when I started my company. We have three full-time...full-tim...like I am. So we go to school, but when we are out of school then we do some jobs and marketing and such. Uh, it specializes in making home computers, and mostly...mostly we do gaming computers for kids like us. We know what we want, and that's what we do. So um...this is actually the main side, as you can see. There came my friend, and he's eating a motherboard. It's so easy. I can't lose any money, but I can make money if I work hard. Well, if it can provide us when we are graduating and...and don't get any better jobs, then...then it's good that we have somewhere to work—somewhere to work, you know." By luck I stumbled on this student project in one of the schools where students were learning about innovation and entrepreneurship by forming teams that had to produce a new product or service overnight—quite literally. They were spending the night in schools with their teams and with adult chaperons, learning the skills of innovation and entrepreneurship. You know, it's a very rare school in our country that teaches anything like that. We have some schools that do an extraordinary job of giving all students a work-based internship, some schools that enable students to do what we call service learning—community service—but I think in Finland these things are far more common, whereas in our country they are the exception to the rule. "Tell us a little bit about this Innovation Camp. What...what is it about?" "Well, it's about...what's it called? Entrepreneurial...entrepreneurship. Yeah. Okay. And um...we're here to...how do I say this? Well, people are coming here; we are forming groups of five, six, seven people—about in a group—and they're going to start a business." "Is it true you're going to be here all night long?" "Yes. 24 hours." "Uh, 26...26 hours. Yes." "What is the point of being here all night long?" "It exhausts you to the limit, where you really got to push it to the limit. Yeah. Well, if you hang around for 24 hours with the same people over here, well, you learn to know the people that you're working with, so you get better teamwork—teamwork, of course—and...think more freely—not so...more open-minded. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Um...well, you have to be really social in these things. Really, it's...it's not that obvious for everyone. So...well, people may think that you can...well, I can make a company of my own, and I can do it all by myself; I don't need any help. That's not true. You learn it here."

Back in the 1970s, Finland realized it really could leave no child behind because every child was needed to be a part of a greater wealth of the country. So what have you done? You said you've been kind of creating your education system from scratch since 19...1970s. What are its homeworks? To be frank, we didn't start totally from scratch, but actually we formed comprehensive school in Finland during the 1970s. The comprehensive school is intended for all—not segregating the age group. The parallel system refers to the system that is still present in Germany, for example. In the first five years during your...your education, at the age of 11, that they tell that you're a poor-performing student, you're never going to end up with the academic profession, and that's like a...that's like a weapon that they use, like a whip. And it's totally different from the idea that we have about education—providing everybody the same possibility, the same opportunities, even the same curriculum. We started to discuss about the possibility of...of a single and unique and equal education for all, and it took five years to discuss that, but finally it came into force in 1973 that there should be a kind of basic education that is similar for everyone, regardless of...of social or economic background. The system in Finland lies on the principle of equality and equity. As a parent, you are sure wherever you live in this country that your child is getting the same type of education with the same type of curriculum. So it's equal, and it's free. They get all the materials free of charge; they get their food, lunches, even snacks, like in our school, free of charge. It's very democratic in that...in that way. "Can you tell me about the balance between what...what is done nationally versus what is done...done locally?" Yeah, nowadays the Finnish state and actually the Finnish National Board of Education sets core curriculum for basic education. It's...it's gives much leeway to...to schools and municipalities to operate. It's also blessedly brief, isn't it? I mean, your curriculum frameworks are about this thick, aren't they? Which is really extraordinary when I think about our texts. "It's...it's...that's true. In our society we have a core curriculum, and then schools make their own curriculums, and they have lots of liberty in making their own decisions." The second phase was actually that...that during the 1980s we moved teacher education and training to universities, so that all teachers are required nowadays a master's degree in universities. We do not have any kind of an inspectorate; you know, there are no inspecting schools or teachers. We kind of trust our system, you know. We have a whole system where principals are supposed to come in and formally evaluate the teacher, but you don't do that here, do you? In Finland the school's education system is based on trust—that the teachers are trusted to do their work properly. If people are trusted, then they want to be worth that trust; they...they are more bound to be trustworthy. I think people perform better when they are trusted; they do a better job when they are not controlled, because nobody wants to be told what to do. So there is a huge trust to all levels in this educational system. We have Ministry trusts on the schools and...and this system, and parents trust on our educational system that allows you to act freely, concentrate on your individual way of learning—how to learn. Actually, it took 25 years to learn how to trust, and in 1991, 1993, when we localized the curricular process, I told you previously, we learned to trust each other. I think if people are always checking up on you, then you are just trying to show them that...or...or try to look that you are doing your job well, but if...if somebody really trusts you, then you...I think it's a basic human quality—one wanting to be worth that trust. A compliance-based system, you know, is something we see around us all the time where students are saying, "What...what's...what do I have to do to get a C or a B? What's the minimum?" Teacher sometimes complying with the district mandates, districts complying with the testing requirements, everybody trying to figure out what's the minimum they have to do to just get by. So far, the trust has been very important, and I would like to say that that why we can have trust is that we have trained and...and educated teachers so well, we can trust them; they are professionals. If they failed and otherwise we couldn't work actually. If we set too strict guidelines for teachers and they are highly trained, why bother? It's up to teachers to do their job, but trust is...is incorporated in...in many ways in Finnish society, you know. I've seen some wonderful schools in this country; almost all of them were small, almost all of them were startups in the sense that they were new, small schools within schools, schools of choice or charter schools, and almost all of them were based on trust. So there's no question in my mind that a

No. You know what most impressed me about my experience in Finland is the way an entire country has focused relentlessly on preparing all students for work and citizenship in the 21st century. But the real question is, what can we here in America learn from their experience? Clearly, they're a very different country, different culture. Our country is far more heterogeneous and larger, and obviously what works in one country may or may not work in another. Nevertheless, I think it would be a serious mistake to just dismiss Finland. In fact, I believe we need to see Finland as a laboratory for 21st-century educational innovation, a place that has done sustained research and development to create a truly world-class education system for a new century. Oh, well done, good job.

One of the most important lessons from Finland is that the business of school is learning, period. It's not sports, nor is it even extracurriculars; nothing interrupts the learning process in classrooms. It is sacrosanct. A second valuable lesson is the way in which they have totally transformed the education profession over the last quarter-century: very high standards for admission into schools of education, so only the very top students become teachers. All teachers must earn a master's degree, which brings far more academic rigor into the classroom. And the kind of training these student teachers receive—where they observe master teachers and have their own teaching practices critically evaluated—really prepares them to enter into the classroom ready to engage all students.

Yet a third lesson from Finland is the idea of less being more: very few national curriculum guidelines, which can be adapted locally. Class time is longer, and there are fewer classes in the day, which allows students far more time to do projects and to go into greater depth in their academic studies. Then there are the ways in which Finland has focused on how best to motivate students: the students have many more choices for the projects they pursue in their classes, and the arts are far more well-integrated into every class. But perhaps most important is developing a very comprehensive vocational education system at the high school level, which prepares students for jobs immediately out of high school. I have to wonder that if we gave every student the choice of a high-caliber vocational education system in every high school in America, might we not be able to significantly reduce our epidemic dropout rate?

But what I found most surprising of all is the way in which the Finnish education system is built upon trust: the ministry trusts the municipalities to adapt and adopt the national curriculum as needed; the municipalities trust the teachers and the schools to do what's right; the teachers even trust the students to use their time wisely and to use the internet and other technologies responsibly. Of course, trust doesn't happen overnight. The Finns began with developing a real consensus about the importance of education and the purpose of education. This consensus has enabled Finns to work far more collaboratively and cooperatively to prepare all of their children for a rich and satisfying and productive life in the new global knowledge economy.

So, is there anything Finland might learn from some of America's best education practices? Actually, I think there is. In the best schools that I've seen in this country, students have digital portfolios and publish their work; teachers videotape their own and one another's lessons, leading to a kind of transparency for all students and teachers in learning and teaching. So, of course, we have some wonderful teachers and extraordinary schools here in America, but what was so inspiring about Finland is the way in which they are doing this kind of high level of education for every single student in the country. For me, this is the Finland phenomenon.