How Finland became an education leader

How Finland became an education leader

The final point of the article really hit home:
"How did Finland manage to elevate the role of teacher in the eyes of the population to something that is not just an honorable profession, but a revered profession, whereas in the United States, teachers are so regularly denigrated?"

"They really think about teachers as scientists and the classrooms are their laboratories. So, as I mentioned -- every teacher has to have a masters degree, and it's a content degree where they're not just taking silly courses on education theory and history. They're taking content courses that enable them to bring a higher level of intellectual preparation into the classroom. That's the first point.

The second point is that they've defined professionalism as working more collaboratively. They give their teachers time in the school day and in the school week to work with each other, to continuously improve their curriculum and their lessons. We have a 19th century level of professionalism here, or worse, it's medieval. A teacher works alone all day, everyday, and isolation is the enemy of improvement and innovation, which is something the Finns figured out a long time ago. Get the teachers out of their isolated circumstances and give them time to work together."

RSS Feeds and Time Saved

First, I love to read.  Since the age of three I read anything and everything, especially nonfiction.  When I do read fiction, I usually choose one author and read everything written by that person.  During summers as a child, I used to walk to the public library; now I use the internet.  The problem is that I simply cannot read everything.  So, a few years ago I began to use RSS feeds.  There are so many new gadgets to make RSS feeds even easier to access.  I love my iGoogle page, and especially NPR.org.  Sometimes I need real world connections, not just education articles.  NPR provides just that.
The next step in the world of blogging about my profession is to improve the RSS news feeds on my blog, which I just did!  Blogging requires time and constant change, however, the more I blog, the more I want to required blogging for students.
As an educator, it is difficult to keep up with news and trends, so linking iGoogle and Blogger are good ways to continue to be proactive about literacy, technology, and other trends.  Sometimes, however, the personal and professional lives become interconnected to the point it is hard to tune out.  Is that possible in the 21st century.  As educators, we have to keep up with the way teens live and think.  If we don't develop new ways of motivating our youth to read and think, we cannot begin to reform our education system.
The politicians need to find ways to incorporate more money for technology into school budgets, and to be sure there is equity in all of the schools.  Teachers and administrators need to use technology, and to keep up with professional development, and to integrate technology into the lessons.  There are so many free resources, including district level training.  I am amazed that some of the young teachers may have not had access to technology in schools, including universities.   If social media can cause political upheaval, THINK what teachers can do.