As I sat and listened to Tony Cook presenting his keynote today, I was reliving where we are currently moving along the educational spectrum as regards my school being an independent government school. The key messages we hear are about improving teacher quality and the quality of leaders in the system. The emphasis is on results of the inputs and not on the actual inputs themselves. Kirsti Lonka hit the nail on the head with her revelation that in Finland, the focus is on the inputs – each child is considered on their educational journey and teachers often stay with the students for several years, which means that they know the students well and can cater for their development as a whole person. Tony Cook realises that what we are trying to do is produce global citizens but I believe in order to do that we need to do a few things a bit differently. Kirsti Lonka’s group’s research focus is currently on how to engage students so they are working within the FLOW as much as possible. What this means is finding out what students are interested in, engaging their hearts and minds so that they are ready to learn and scaffolding their learning experiences so that the level of anxiety is lessened and the experience becomes more positive.

What I have learned from listening to Kirsti Lonka’s presentation is that our educational system is trying to travel along the same path as Finland’s but I have concluded that there are some major differences.

Firstly, not all of our teachers have Masters Degrees, and many do not – for one reason or another – continue their academic education during their careers. Instead they are supported in a number of ways with in-service courses on specific things in which they are interested or which schools dictate their staff need to complete. While this can be costly, it can serve to inject a level of enthusiasm for some people for a short while. I believe that what actually helps teachers more is to have a collegial atmosphere within the individual school or cluster of schools in which everyone firstly tries to “get on the same page” and secondly, where ideas are shared and discussed, even debated, so that they can be improved and refined through action research. This action and reflection process is what ultimately helps people to improve their pedagogy and also the engagement of students – a step in the right direction for further developing the standards we expect of our students.

Secondly, the amount of funding for the youngest students in Finland is higher than that for the older students. This allows every child to have a decent start to their education which is tailored to suit the developmental pathway the child is taking. It was interesting to note that parental leave was 10 months. From the age of 5-6 children attend pre-school programs provided free. The focus in these programs is play. I had a burning question as to whether it was all free play – I should have asked that question. I suspect that there would have been a mix of structured play and free play as there was also a heavy arts and handcrafts component mentioned. What was really important was that parents and teachers meet to make personalised plans for the students. Read more about a Finnish pre-school here. I found this article really interesting too!

Thirdly, and what is rather interesting to note, the focus on accountability is not foremost in the mind of anyone within the school system in Finland. Yes, they have ways of checking how things are going but, they don’t have the heavy testing focus such as that which exists in the USA, United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, Australia. I would have to agree that cutting down the testing regime might upset those who develop our policies and who use the test results to keep track of what outcomes are being produced via the public injection of funding for schools, however, I also think that if all we are testing is multiple choice questioning of specific ranges of question types and text types or maths problems, we are seriously limiting those students who are more than capable of hitting the test ceiling. (Though it was hinted by Tony Cook that NAPLAN online testing will be here by 2016 and it will be adaptive to the answers students give to the questions – therefore giving students who need harder questions the ability to complete them at a higher and higher level.) We are also not allowing students to express their deep knowledge and understanding which can be gained through the use of inquiry approaches – something which we desperately need if we are going to fulfil every child’s potential and allow them to become the connected 21st Century global citizens we want them to become.

I look forward to hearing more in Day 2!