I try to go thru Twitter at least once a day. I have chosen 437 people to follow and 81 are following me. That means I see the tweets (140 characters or less, often including a link to more pages) of 437 people. Some of them write several times a day and some maybe once a month.
Yesterday, I read a tweet by Pasi Sahlberg that I reserved in my head for today's post. Mr. Sahlberg is Finnish. Finland gets lots of attention in educational circles because its students usually come out at the top of any international assessment or school system evaluation. The tweet yesterday summarized an invited speech he gave in Wales. The Welsh schools recently came out at the bottom of the UK schools and various ideas have been put forward to improve Welsh education. Sahlberg used to work for the Finnish ministry of education and sees giant differences between many education reforms and the Finnish approach.
The key paragraph for me was:
He said many of the policies popular with the 'global educational reform movement' were at odds with those practised in Finland; competition instead of collaboration, standardisation instead of creativity, test-based accountability instead of trust-based responsibility, and choice instead of equity.
Note his contrasts, the first of which is popular with many reform efforts and the second is the recommendation and practice in Finland:
- competition instead of collaboration,
- standardisation instead of creativity,
- test-based accountability instead of trust-based responsibility, and
- choice instead of equity.
If you are not familiar with the typical energetic, competitive, muscular gung-ho "Shape up now!"approach to better education, you probably don't realize how shocking his statement is. The speech in Wales is not unique. He and others have said the same thing elsewhere, many times.
Not to be sexist or political, one of the genders is more often associated with energy, sweat, competition and winning, winning, winning. One of the major American political parties is more often associated with similar hard-driving, orderly, organized, proven, disciplined approaches to problems. You don't get a whole gender, designed the evolutionists say, by the other gender and its choices and natural forces, totally wrong or mistaken. You don't get a major political party in a land of 311 million people totally wrong or wrong-headed. However, the Finns and plenty of educators elsewhere have repeatedly said that getting the best from people requires careful individual attention to each person.
As a side note, the Gallup polling organization researched good and successful managers around the world a decade or so ago. It found that much of the usual practice in hiring was to carefully outline a job's requirements and then find the applicant who most completely filled them. However, the research showed that this approach was just backward. The best results were achieved when the organization searched out the skills and abilities of each applicant and then found ways to apply that person's knowledge and potential where they were most effective in the organization.
Experienced and insightful educators wrote about this before I was born. See "The Animal School" from 1937.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
