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Celebrating Success
In the spring of 2011, ATA President Carol Henderson led an Alberta delegation of teachers, principals and Association staff to Helsinki, Finland. The trip continued an ongoing partnership between Finland and Alberta, as two of the world’s top-performing education systems continue to learn from each other.
I’m grateful to our Finnish counterparts, who generously took the time to teach us about their education system. Of course, the Alberta system has many strengths, too, and there is no need to throw it out the window, but certain aspects of the Finnish system merit study.
Although Finnish children do not start Grade 1 until the age of 7, there is extensive preschool activity in the early years and a focus on playtime. The country’s public health system ensures that students receive eye exams and hearing tests. Problems are dealt with as quickly as possible. Interventions, including those related to disabilities, are conducted at an early age. For example, students who need speech therapy receive it in the early years, not when they’re well into elementary school. Since equality of opportunity is an important element of the Finnish system, the Finns identify and treat learning disabilities as early as possible—the focus is on prevention, not repair, and their education system is designed to do this.
One of the most important elements of Finnish success in education is the national core curriculum. Rather than prescribing what teachers teach every minute of the waking day, the Finns have a core curriculum that is a foundation upon which a school or municipality develops additional curriculum. The curriculum development process requires teachers to discuss what to teach and how best to teach it. Discussions might also be held in the community about what to teach; for example, if we applied this approach to Alberta, science, social studies or mathematics might look different in Fort McMurray (with its oil sands) compared to Jasper (with its Rocky Mountains). In some respects, the product is less important than the process—teachers engage in discussions about what to teach and how to teach it, and these discussions improve the program and its delivery. The end result is better teaching of a relevant and supported curriculum.
High stakes testing occurs only at the end of upper-general secondary school in Finland—there is faith in teachers to effectively assess the progress of students up until this point. Finnish teachers take their professional responsibility seriously, and the public relies on them to deliver on their professional practice obligations.
Professional development, research by teachers and school improvement are important elements of the Finnish education system. Given the nature of the country’s national core curriculum, every teacher is a researcher, and teachers continually strive to learn from practice and to improve the system. Finnish teacher education programs produce outstanding teachers who are then given the responsibility and the latitude to practise their profession. Teachers are highly respected members of society in Finland, and Finnish teacher preparation programs are among the hardest university programs to enter—only about one applicant in ten gets into a teacher preparation program.
Possibly one of the most important lessons to be learned from the Finns was described by Irmeli Halinen, a keynote speaker at the ATA’s Invitational Symposium on Curriculum Design for Informed Transformation: Creating a Great School for Every Student, held in early November 2011. Halinen, head of the curriculum development unit, Finnish National Board of Education, noted that in many countries the role of the teacher is to support the system; in Finland, the teacher is supported by the system and its resources. This would be a powerful conceptual change for Alberta.
We can learn much from Finland. Some of the elements that interest us are early intervention programs, early learning and curriculum development processes that create discussion about what to teach and how, equal opportunity for all students, assessment practices that rely on the professional judgment of classroom teachers, first-rate teacher preparation and school improvement, and teacher research initiatives. I look forward to our two jurisdictions continuing to work together as two of the top-performing education systems in the world to make our education systems even better.
