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Finn here. Results have been negative on this so far, at least for students before high school [1]. Most children at that stage aren't yet capable of self-direc

Finn here. Results have been negative on this so far, at least for students before high school [1]. Most children at that stage aren't yet capable of self-directed learning. Problem is compounded by the distractive effect of digital equipment in class. [1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-based_curriculum_impedes_learning_researcher_finds/10514984 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-based_cu...

wirrbel 6y ago
German here, we also have our fair share of experimentation on children in schools.. From what I have learned while reading about pedagocial reforms, most arguments don't really treat the student body as a diverse set of people, rather they pretend that students are all alike and then present a way of learning that a subset of the students strive with. This is not about the (long debunke) myth that some people would be visual learners and some would learn better with their sense of smell. No. What I mean is, some people fare better with lecture-style classroom presentations, some better with individual experimentation. All kids need guidance. It seems that the reforms that are made are usually a certain pedagocial-model teaming up with monetary or economic interests (cutting costs in education). So in our schools, we saw that Physics teachers were on short supply (they rather earned better money outside of schools). So they mixed all Science subjects in middle school and named it "Natural Phenomena". As a result, the physics is taught by biology teachers who sometimes prepared their lessons with the math teachers of the school because it wasn't their core strength...
- tilolebo 6y ago
  French living in Germany and married to a primary school teacher here. Theoretically,differentiated learning is what teachers should use. But as you observed, and like in many other countries such as France, reforms supposedly pedagogical are mostly decided based on economic interests. On the field, teachers are understaffed and unable to apply the program.
- vimslayer 6y ago
  I think pretty much everyone agrees with you on that, I haven't seen anyone advocate that students _should_ be treated all alike. It's just that providing individual guidance requires more teachers and thus more money... And then someone comes in and suggests that we don't need so many new teachers if we "use technology" to help fill the need, like some learning app could be the silver bullet that revolutionizes teaching. Maybe it will some day, but seeing what we've had so far I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting to see that happen.
  - WanderPanda 6y ago
    In Germany the zeitgeist is: equal opportunity = treating all students alike (even ones with special needs). If you are arguing for more individual and specialized education, you are widely considered anti-social and it is suggested that your intend is to build / maintain a small (educational) elite that aspires to enslave all others...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - watwut 6y ago
      But Germany splits students int different tracks quite soon. There is differentiation when kids are something like 10-12.
      - usr1106 6y ago
        Remember that there is no German school system. Education is subject of state (Länder) law. So there are quite some differences between different parts of Germany. Traditionally, some 30-40 years back you were supposed to know whether you go to university or not at the age of ten. However, this is no longer really the case. Many prepare for university in theory, but never go there.
jacobush 6y ago
Welcome to Sweden. I was hoping we would catch up with you again, but not this way...
jay4Oov9 6y ago
Is there a separation in Finland between public school (where those programs are applied) and private school (which do what they want)? And if so, do the ministers and government officials who decided on that send their kids to public schools? (not implying any scheme, just curious if they eat their own dogfood)
- asutekku 6y ago
  We really do not have any private schools in finland, almost everything is public.
  - jay4Oov9 6y ago
    Oh, that's great (for equity between citizen, that is). Somehow, you guys always rock :)
- eMSF 6y ago
  Private schools are rather rare, and most of them follow the national curriculum. I don't think their small existence affects policy changes like this much at all.
- emilfihlman 6y ago
  There really are not "private" schools in Finland (not in comprehensive school nor in upper secondary). They must all follow the same teaching requirements that public schools offer and they get government funding. And you don't get in with money but via application. So they are more like schools that are run by private individuals.
chongli 6y ago
I thought Finland already had the best schools in the world? Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? This sounds terrible. Not everything in life can be achieved purely by intrinsic motivation. Human beings are a social species. We motivate each other through laws, social norms, and economic incentives. Children, who don’t know about any of those things, need direction lest they be caught totally unprepared.
- eMSF 6y ago
  >Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? Not only that, but the current administration may have vastly overestimated their own influence in the previously great PISA results. Putting all their “smarts” into overhauling the system to improve it might not do anything of the sort.
- rgblambda 6y ago
  >> Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? I remember watching an interview with a Finnish teacher where they were asked this very question. Their answer was something like "Being best in the world doesn't mean we can't be better" When you realise that Finland has little in the way of natural resources and it's economy is very much tied to the skills of the population it makes a lot of sense to be this focused on education.
  - chongli 6y ago
    Of course you can always be better. The question is whether you should flip the table with a radical experiment when you’re already number one. You don’t hear of many sports teams doing this. Businesses that try it risk a shareholder revolt.
- AQuantized 6y ago
  I think this is at odds with how they achieved that result to begin with. To become the best you have to be willing to experiment. It makes sense to keep iterating the process so long as you continue the majority of good practices and return to a previous iteration if it doesn't work out.
smoe 6y ago
From the article linked: "[...] phenomenon-based learning requires students have strong self-discipline and initiative. They also require students to be independent, focused and flexible." I'm not a teacher nor do I have children, so I'm mostly ignorant about this topic. But reading this made me think, if we shouldn't but maybe much more focus on qualities like being independent, focused and flexible early on instead of strictly following subjects as measured by Pisa tests? Given just how hard it is to focus and not procrastinate in today digital world, even for adults. I'm not sold on pure Phenomenal Education as I understand it. But my hunch is, that a mix could work quite well. Spent part of the time on focused bottom up learning on a single topic, and another in a more exploratory top down way.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Sometimes people and institutions who say "I am going to focus on nice-sounding nebulous goals instead of this measurable stuff" achieve neither. I'd like to keep some measurable goals in school system. But maybe we could have both. Self-directed learning, and then participating in Pisa tests. With no bad consequences for the student if they utterly fail because they studied something else. But to have some feedback like "while you congratulate yourself on this and that, literacy in your country is the worst in the world".
  - smoe 6y ago
    I think I was/am one of the students that would have benefited from more cross-pollination of topics and a mix between self direction and directions. I never enjoyed math for its own sake when I was in school and my grades where pretty mediocre, later I had the same with algorithms & data structures. On their own, how they are often presented in books and platforms like hacker rank, I find them rather boring and solving challanges just with a correct and optimal solution in mind is not very appealing to me. But as soon as I'm in a work context, or when I dabbled in computational biology or digital signal processing for music on the side I can completely lose the sense of time while digging into whatever is necessary to get done what I want to do. So I think there a ways to get from nebulous goals and activities into measurable impacts.
kstenerud 6y ago
The problem stems from trying to make a one-size-fits-all solution. You can never fit everyone into the same box, but people like simple solutions so we keep trying. In the 2nd grade, I had a teacher who recognized potential in some of her students and separated them from the rest of the class to engage in self-directed learning. There were three of us chosen. I achieved grade 5 level proficiency in a number of subjects, while the smartest kid reached grade 7 in almost all of them. The following year, I changed schools, and spent the next 3 years re-doing the same boring shit over and over. My protestations were countered with "Well, if you've already done it, then it should be easy to do it again!" I learned my lesson, and my grades from that point on slipped from straight As to the minimum required to pass. I'd only apply myself when doing my own projects (mostly programming). Like in anything else, if you want to see success, you need to hire teachers who can recognize and focus potential, and then give them the leeway to do so based on their good judgment.
- netjiro 6y ago
  I've seen test numbers where the top 5% group learn around 5-10x faster than the 50% group. The numbers hold for short term recall, long term recall, problem solving, critical and creative thinking, etc. There is no way "school" can equalise this. There is no reason to keep stuffing everyone in one box.
  - danenania 6y ago
    I believe that in Japan, they deal with this disparity by asking the top students to help teach others in the class. It seems like an interesting approach in that teaching something well requires a much higher bar of understanding than doing well on a test, and it’s an excellent way to reinforce knowledge for the one doing the teaching. So the top students get a more difficult challenge than just coasting along, and the other students benefit as well. And, of course, it promotes teamwork and solidarity. I’m sure there are downsides too. Perhaps it could create tension between the “teacher’s pets” and the others?
    - kstenerud 6y ago
zerr 6y ago
Off-topic: can you please share where the materials (curriculum, books/ref, etc..) of coding classes at Finnish schools can be found?
mordae 6y ago
Digital equipment was never designed with teaching in mind. Take a typical Android installation for an example. - There is no tutorial mode for a true newcomer. - There is no central naming scheme - every application is an island. - Most of the applications are hostile and present you with ads. - Most of the applications won't let you study them. It resembles a street market more than a safe learning environment.
em-bee 6y ago
but that's not the students fault. self directed learning had to be practiced with guidance. it doesn't emerge by itself. the montessori method comes to mind as an approach that potentially enables self directed learning.
ivan_ah 6y ago
Thanks for sharing that article. Would you happen to have other recent articles that describe the results after 3 years of the new approach? [Even if you google search for me in Finnish and share the top-five relevant results, this would be super helpful for me. I can use google translate after that.] I agree with you that primary and middle school students are too young to be self-directed, but that doesn't necessarily contradict the no-subjects approach. The phenomenon-based learning can still be led by a teacher. Also as far as technology being distracting, that doesn't surprise me much. I think some very careful selection of the apps and tools is needed, but it can totally be done (e.g. offline or local installation of web apps and tools specific to learning and not open access to the internet or game-like apps).
vmception 6y ago
There are grade-flexible schools systems with mixed classrooms. I wonder if Finland evaluated that. I saw one school system where the students vote on everything. It wasn't Montessori but something else I can't remember the name of.

wirrbel 6y ago

German here, we also have our fair share of experimentation on children in schools.. From what I have learned while reading about pedagocial reforms, most arguments don't really treat the student body as a diverse set of people, rather they pretend that students are all alike and then present a way of learning that a subset of the students strive with. This is not about the (long debunke) myth that some people would be visual learners and some would learn better with their sense of smell. No. What I mean is, some people fare better with lecture-style classroom presentations, some better with individual experimentation. All kids need guidance. It seems that the reforms that are made are usually a certain pedagocial-model teaming up with monetary or economic interests (cutting costs in education). So in our schools, we saw that Physics teachers were on short supply (they rather earned better money outside of schools). So they mixed all Science subjects in middle school and named it "Natural Phenomena". As a result, the physics is taught by biology teachers who sometimes prepared their lessons with the math teachers of the school because it wasn't their core strength...

tilolebo 6y ago
French living in Germany and married to a primary school teacher here. Theoretically,differentiated learning is what teachers should use. But as you observed, and like in many other countries such as France, reforms supposedly pedagogical are mostly decided based on economic interests. On the field, teachers are understaffed and unable to apply the program.
vimslayer 6y ago
I think pretty much everyone agrees with you on that, I haven't seen anyone advocate that students _should_ be treated all alike. It's just that providing individual guidance requires more teachers and thus more money... And then someone comes in and suggests that we don't need so many new teachers if we "use technology" to help fill the need, like some learning app could be the silver bullet that revolutionizes teaching. Maybe it will some day, but seeing what we've had so far I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting to see that happen.
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  In Germany the zeitgeist is: equal opportunity = treating all students alike (even ones with special needs). If you are arguing for more individual and specialized education, you are widely considered anti-social and it is suggested that your intend is to build / maintain a small (educational) elite that aspires to enslave all others...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - watwut 6y ago
    But Germany splits students int different tracks quite soon. There is differentiation when kids are something like 10-12.
    - usr1106 6y ago
      Remember that there is no German school system. Education is subject of state (Länder) law. So there are quite some differences between different parts of Germany. Traditionally, some 30-40 years back you were supposed to know whether you go to university or not at the age of ten. However, this is no longer really the case. Many prepare for university in theory, but never go there.

jacobush 6y ago

Welcome to Sweden. I was hoping we would catch up with you again, but not this way...

jay4Oov9 6y ago

Is there a separation in Finland between public school (where those programs are applied) and private school (which do what they want)? And if so, do the ministers and government officials who decided on that send their kids to public schools? (not implying any scheme, just curious if they eat their own dogfood)

asutekku 6y ago
We really do not have any private schools in finland, almost everything is public.
- jay4Oov9 6y ago
  Oh, that's great (for equity between citizen, that is). Somehow, you guys always rock :)
eMSF 6y ago
Private schools are rather rare, and most of them follow the national curriculum. I don't think their small existence affects policy changes like this much at all.
emilfihlman 6y ago
There really are not "private" schools in Finland (not in comprehensive school nor in upper secondary). They must all follow the same teaching requirements that public schools offer and they get government funding. And you don't get in with money but via application. So they are more like schools that are run by private individuals.

chongli 6y ago

I thought Finland already had the best schools in the world? Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? This sounds terrible. Not everything in life can be achieved purely by intrinsic motivation. Human beings are a social species. We motivate each other through laws, social norms, and economic incentives. Children, who don’t know about any of those things, need direction lest they be caught totally unprepared.

eMSF 6y ago
>Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? Not only that, but the current administration may have vastly overestimated their own influence in the previously great PISA results. Putting all their “smarts” into overhauling the system to improve it might not do anything of the sort.
rgblambda 6y ago
>> Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? I remember watching an interview with a Finnish teacher where they were asked this very question. Their answer was something like "Being best in the world doesn't mean we can't be better" When you realise that Finland has little in the way of natural resources and it's economy is very much tied to the skills of the population it makes a lot of sense to be this focused on education.
- chongli 6y ago
  Of course you can always be better. The question is whether you should flip the table with a radical experiment when you’re already number one. You don’t hear of many sports teams doing this. Businesses that try it risk a shareholder revolt.
AQuantized 6y ago
I think this is at odds with how they achieved that result to begin with. To become the best you have to be willing to experiment. It makes sense to keep iterating the process so long as you continue the majority of good practices and return to a previous iteration if it doesn't work out.

smoe 6y ago

From the article linked: "[...] phenomenon-based learning requires students have strong self-discipline and initiative. They also require students to be independent, focused and flexible." I'm not a teacher nor do I have children, so I'm mostly ignorant about this topic. But reading this made me think, if we shouldn't but maybe much more focus on qualities like being independent, focused and flexible early on instead of strictly following subjects as measured by Pisa tests? Given just how hard it is to focus and not procrastinate in today digital world, even for adults. I'm not sold on pure Phenomenal Education as I understand it. But my hunch is, that a mix could work quite well. Spent part of the time on focused bottom up learning on a single topic, and another in a more exploratory top down way.

Viliam1234 6y ago
Sometimes people and institutions who say "I am going to focus on nice-sounding nebulous goals instead of this measurable stuff" achieve neither. I'd like to keep some measurable goals in school system. But maybe we could have both. Self-directed learning, and then participating in Pisa tests. With no bad consequences for the student if they utterly fail because they studied something else. But to have some feedback like "while you congratulate yourself on this and that, literacy in your country is the worst in the world".
- smoe 6y ago
  I think I was/am one of the students that would have benefited from more cross-pollination of topics and a mix between self direction and directions. I never enjoyed math for its own sake when I was in school and my grades where pretty mediocre, later I had the same with algorithms & data structures. On their own, how they are often presented in books and platforms like hacker rank, I find them rather boring and solving challanges just with a correct and optimal solution in mind is not very appealing to me. But as soon as I'm in a work context, or when I dabbled in computational biology or digital signal processing for music on the side I can completely lose the sense of time while digging into whatever is necessary to get done what I want to do. So I think there a ways to get from nebulous goals and activities into measurable impacts.

kstenerud 6y ago

The problem stems from trying to make a one-size-fits-all solution. You can never fit everyone into the same box, but people like simple solutions so we keep trying. In the 2nd grade, I had a teacher who recognized potential in some of her students and separated them from the rest of the class to engage in self-directed learning. There were three of us chosen. I achieved grade 5 level proficiency in a number of subjects, while the smartest kid reached grade 7 in almost all of them. The following year, I changed schools, and spent the next 3 years re-doing the same boring shit over and over. My protestations were countered with "Well, if you've already done it, then it should be easy to do it again!" I learned my lesson, and my grades from that point on slipped from straight As to the minimum required to pass. I'd only apply myself when doing my own projects (mostly programming). Like in anything else, if you want to see success, you need to hire teachers who can recognize and focus potential, and then give them the leeway to do so based on their good judgment.

netjiro 6y ago
I've seen test numbers where the top 5% group learn around 5-10x faster than the 50% group. The numbers hold for short term recall, long term recall, problem solving, critical and creative thinking, etc. There is no way "school" can equalise this. There is no reason to keep stuffing everyone in one box.
- danenania 6y ago
  I believe that in Japan, they deal with this disparity by asking the top students to help teach others in the class. It seems like an interesting approach in that teaching something well requires a much higher bar of understanding than doing well on a test, and it’s an excellent way to reinforce knowledge for the one doing the teaching. So the top students get a more difficult challenge than just coasting along, and the other students benefit as well. And, of course, it promotes teamwork and solidarity. I’m sure there are downsides too. Perhaps it could create tension between the “teacher’s pets” and the others?
  - kstenerud 6y ago

zerr 6y ago

Off-topic: can you please share where the materials (curriculum, books/ref, etc..) of coding classes at Finnish schools can be found?

mordae 6y ago

Digital equipment was never designed with teaching in mind. Take a typical Android installation for an example. - There is no tutorial mode for a true newcomer. - There is no central naming scheme - every application is an island. - Most of the applications are hostile and present you with ads. - Most of the applications won't let you study them. It resembles a street market more than a safe learning environment.

em-bee 6y ago

but that's not the students fault. self directed learning had to be practiced with guidance. it doesn't emerge by itself. the montessori method comes to mind as an approach that potentially enables self directed learning.

ivan_ah 6y ago

Thanks for sharing that article. Would you happen to have other recent articles that describe the results after 3 years of the new approach? [Even if you google search for me in Finnish and share the top-five relevant results, this would be super helpful for me. I can use google translate after that.] I agree with you that primary and middle school students are too young to be self-directed, but that doesn't necessarily contradict the no-subjects approach. The phenomenon-based learning can still be led by a teacher. Also as far as technology being distracting, that doesn't surprise me much. I think some very careful selection of the apps and tools is needed, but it can totally be done (e.g. offline or local installation of web apps and tools specific to learning and not open access to the internet or game-like apps).

vmception 6y ago

There are grade-flexible schools systems with mixed classrooms. I wonder if Finland evaluated that. I saw one school system where the students vote on everything. It wasn't Montessori but something else I can't remember the name of.