http://curiousmindmagazine.com/goodbye-subjects-finland-taking-revolution-education-step/

Finland Will Become The First Country In The World To Get Rid Of All School Subjects

Dec 27, 2016

In an era of technology and easily accessible information, our schools still expect from us to know everything from the books, without considering whether this is going to be what we will actually need in our professional development. How many times have you wondered if you were going to need a subjects you were made to learn because the curriculum said so? Finland has decided to change this in their educational system and introduce something which is suitable for the 21^st century.

By 2020, instead of classes in physics, math, literature, history or geography, Finland is going to introduce a different approach to life through education. Welcome to the phenomenon based learning!

As Phenomenal Education states on their website, “In Phenomenon Based Learning (PhenoBL) and teaching, holistic real-world phenomena provide the starting point for learning. The phenomena are studied as complete entities, in their real context, and the information and skills related to them are studied by crossing the boundaries between subjects.”

This means that instead of learning physics (or any other subject) for the sake of learning it, the students will be given the opportunity to choose from phenomena from their real surroundings and the world, such as Media and Technology, or the European Union. 

These phenomena will be studied through an interdisciplinary approach, which means subjects will be included, but only those (and only parts of them) that contribute to excelling in the topic.

For example, a student who wants to study a vocational course can take “cafeteria services” and the phenomenon will be studied through elements of maths, languages, writing and communication skills. Another example is the European Union, which would include economics, languages, geography and the history of the countries involved. 

Now take your profession as an example and think of all the information you need to know connected to it – you are now thinking the PhenoBL way!

This kind of learning will include both face-to-face and online sessions, with a strong emphasis on the beneficial use of technology and the Internet through the process of eLearning. You can read more about it here.

In the learning process, the students will be able to collaborate with their peers and teachers through sharing information and collectively exploring and implementing new information as a building tool.

 The teaching style is going to change too!

Instead of the traditional style of teacher-centered learning, with students sitting behind their desks and recording every instruction given by the teacher, the approach is going to change to a holistic level. This means that every phenomenon will be approached in the most suitable and natural way possible.

However, as Phenomenal Learning states, “The starting point of phenomenal-based teaching is constructivism, in which learners are seen as active knowledge builders and information is seen as being constructed as a result of problem-solving, constructed out of ‘little pieces’ into a whole that suits the situation in which it is used at the time.”

This educational system tends to include leaning in a collaborative setting (e.g. teamwork), where they would like to see information being formed in a social context, instead of it being seen only as an internal element of an individual.

This approach is going to support inquiry-based learning, problem-solution and project and portfolio learning. The last step is going to be practical implementation, being seen as the outcome of the whole process.

This reform is going to require a lot of cooperation between teachers of different subjects and this is why the teachers are already undergoing an intense training.

In fact, 70% of the teachers in Helsinki are already involved in the preparatory work in line with the new system. 

Co-teaching is at the base of the curriculum creation, with input from more than one subject specialist and teachers who embrace this new teaching style will receive a small increase in their salary as a sign of recognition.

From a teaching perspective, this style is very rewarding and worthwhile for the teachers too. Some teachers, who have already implemented this style in their work, say that they cannot go back to the old style.

This is indeed not surprising at all, as the interaction in this teaching style is something every teacher has always dreamed of.

Currently, schools are obliged to introduce a period of phenomenal-based learning at least once a year. The plan is to completely implement the PhenoBL approach by 2020. 

A similar approach called the Playful Learning Centre is being used in the pre-school sector and it is going to serve as a starting point for the phenomenal-based learning.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/12/12/this-is-how-to-help-young-children-learn-to-love-school/?utm_term=.84a519652ec9

The big problem with early childhood education

(iStock)

Research in child development over decades as well as modern neuroscience clearly show that young children learn best when they are active. That means they get to put their hands on things, interact with other kids and adults, move a lot, create, play. But in the current school reform era, that’s not what is happening in too many classrooms. The emphasis is on “rigorous instruction,” and young children are forced to sit at their desks doing academic work — sometimes with little or no recess and/or sufficient physical education.

Here is an excerpt of a speech about this issue by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, early childhood education expert and a founding member of a nonprofit called Defending the Early Years, which commissions research about early childhood education and advocates for sane policies for young children. She is professor emerita of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Ma., where she taught teachers for more than 30 years and was a founder of the university’s Center for Peaceable Schools.

Carlsson-Paige is author of “Taking Back Childhood.” The mother of two artist sons, Matt Damon and Kyle Damon, she is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the Legacy Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps for work over several decades on behalf of children and families, and the Deborah Meier award by the nonprofit National Center for Fair and Open Testing. She recently was a keynote speaker at a recent symposium of early childhood educators from the five Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland) and the United States.

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[The decline of play in preschoolers — and the rise in sensory issues] 

This is part of her speech, which I am publishing because it speaks to the continued emphasis on academics — and lack of sufficient play — for our youngest students:

Hello everyone.

It’s really inspiring to learn about early childhood education in the Nordic countries where play is so valued and children don’t begin formal instruction until the age of 7.  We have a very different situation here in the United States, where the pressure to teach academic skills to young children has been increasing over recent years.

For the last 15 years or so, our education system has been dominated by standards and tests, by the gathering of endless amounts of data collected to prove that teachers are doing their job and kids are learning.  But these hyper requirements have oppressed teachers and drained the creativity and joy from learning for students.  Unfortunately, this misguided approach to education has now reached down to our youngest children.

In kindergartens and pre-K classrooms around the country we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in play.  There are fewer activity centers in classrooms and much less child choice, as well as less arts and music.  At the same time, teacher directed instruction has greatly increased, along with more scripted curriculum and paper and pencil tasks.

This unfortunate change in early childhood education can be described as a shift away from child-centered classrooms to skills-centered ones.

Given that we have decades of research and child development theory to support whole child early education, the shift from child-centered to skills–centered education often seems inexplicable and bizarre.  But early childhood educators have not been at the policy-making tables to be able to advocate for developmentally appropriate, play-based learning for young kids.

In addition, we have a longstanding problem in our country that does not seem to plague the Nordic countries.  Here in the U.S., there is an enduring misconception about the nature of play.  Play is typically not seen as valuable or essential to learning.  It’s more commonly viewed as an activity separate from learning rather than as one in which students learn.

Children all over the world play.  They all know how to play, and no one has to teach them how.  Any time we see a human activity that is wired into the brain and accomplished by all children worldwide, we know it is critical to human development.

So much is learned through play in the early years that play has been called the engine of development.  Children learn concepts through play; they learn to cope and make sense of life experiences; and, they develop critical human capacities such as problem solving, imagination, self regulation and original thinking.

When we watch children building in blocks for example, we can see that they are naturally working on many math and science concepts (classification, seriation, 1:1 correspondance, causality, symmetry, etc.)  Teachers encourage this kind of play-based learning and build onto it with new concepts and skills that relate to what children are doing. If kids build a tall tower, the teacher might suggest they measure it with unifix cubes or paper tubes.  Enthusiasm grows as kids find out how tall their building is. They count, measure, compare. Based on a teacher’s judgement, they might draw or write what they find out.  But the new skills children are learning are meaningful.  They are connected to them and an experience that came from them.  The new skills make sense and enrich the activity.

In the U.S. today, skills are often separated from children’s play and active experiences.  Many teachers, under pressure to meet mandates, teach isolated skills and facts directly to groups of children. This makes the skill or fact become an end in itself rather than an integral part of a more holistic and meaningful experience.  And it takes the joy, excitement and empowerment out of learning.

When I think about this, I remember a letter I read years ago that was burned into my memory forever.  It was from a school principal, written to his teachers. The principal was a survivor of a concentration camp. In the letter, he said he had seen educated people — nurses and engineers — build gas chambers and kill innocent children.  And so this principal said he was suspicious of education.  He said:  “Reading and writing and math are important only if they serve to make our children more human.”

The principal understood that you can be very smart and have lots of knowledge and you can use it to destructive ends.  He understood that  it is dangerous to use knowledge outside of a context of meaning, mind and heart, and morality.

I think when we have the kind of education common in the U.S. today — where we separate skills children are learning from their experiences and what they care about — we begin the process of  dehumanizing education.  We teach children that knowing facts and skills, letters and numbers, is enough.  That how we use these tools is not what matters in education.

Two summers ago I spent a week with another family I’m close to.  At the end of the week, my friend Lynne had to leave to visit her mom who was ailing.  Lynne explained to Quentin, her 5-year-old grandson who adores her, that she had to leave a little early to go see her mom.  When Lynne drove out of the driveway, Quentin cried loud and hard, an anguishing cry. I tried to comfort him, and for a while he was inconsolable.  But after a while, Quentin’s cries grew quieter.  I said, “Quentin, I have an idea.  Why don’t I get some paper and markers and you can make a drawing for Nana.  Then we can go to the post office and send it to her.  She will be so happy to get a drawing from you in the mail.”

Quentin shook his head yes, this seemed like a good idea. I got the drawing things and set him up at a table.  When I came back a while later to see what Quentin had drawn, I was most amazed.  On the paper he had written letters:

 I M U N O Nu

Y D U H to  L

I R L L U

(Provided by Nancy Carlsson-Paige)

He read it to me. You might be familiar with early invented spelling; this is a great example.  Quentin had written:  “I miss you Nana.  Why did you have to leave?  I really love you.”

Quentin’s mom, a school principal in New York City was in the room, and she said in amazement, “Quentin has never written before this.”  Then Quentin turned to me and said, “I surprised myself!”

The need to write to his Nana, to convey his strong feelings, led Quentin to find the letters to express himself, his love for Nana and his sadness over her leaving.

Letters, words, and numbers are tools that we use for greater purposes of all kinds — to express ourselves, to solve problems, to investigate questions we want to pursue.  But they aren’t the end point.  They are a means to greater ends.  Ends that have meaning and are connected to us.   We should learn in school that we own these tools and can use them. And we should have educational experiences that help us develop the morality, heart, and civility to know how to use what we know for the greater good.

I hope we early childhood educators in the United States can strengthen our advocacy for children so they can have a more child-centered education.  And I hope that we can advocate for a schooling where reading, writing and math are connected to what children care about and experience. This is the way to help children learn optimally and learn to love school.  And it’s the path we have to be on if we want to educate not just children but future citizens who will contribute to making a better world.

(Correction: Fixing venue of speech)

Sent from my iPhone

http://time.com/4474496/screens-schools-hoax/

Screens In Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras•Aug. 31, 2016

George Frey—Bloomberg/Getty Images Second graders work on iPads as part of their classroom work in a Utah elementary school on Monday, May 20, 2013.

Dr. Kardaras is the author of the new book Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. 

It's a gold rush, not a flood of educational concern

As the dog days of summer wane, most parents are preparing to send their kids back to school. In years past, this has meant buying notebooks and pencils, perhaps even a new backpack. But over the past decade or so, the back-to-school checklist has for many also included an array of screen devices that many parents dutifully stuff into their children’s bag.

The screen revolution has seen pedagogy undergo a seismic shift as technology now dominates the educational landscape. In almost every classroom in America today, you will find some type of screen—smartboards, Chromebooks, tablets, smartphones. From inner-city schools to those in rural and remote towns, we have accepted tech in the classroom as a necessary and beneficial evolution in education.

This is a lie.

Tech in the classroom not only leads to worse educational outcomes for kids, which I will explain shortly, it can also clinically hurt them. I’ve worked with over a thousand teens in the past 15 years and have observed that students who have been raised on a high-tech diet not only appear to struggle more with attention and focus, but also seem to suffer from an adolescent malaise that appears to be a direct byproduct of their digital immersion. Indeed, over two hundred peer-reviewed studies point to screen time correlating to increased ADHD, screen addiction, increased aggression, depression, anxiety and even psychosis.

But if that’s true, why would we have allowed these “educational” Trojan horses to slip into our schools? Follow the money.

Education technology is estimated to become a $60 billion industry by 2018. With the advent of the Common Core in 2010, which nationalized curriculum and textbooks standards, the multi-billion-dollar textbook industry became very attractive for educational gunslingers looking to capitalize on the new Wild West of education technology. A tablet with educational software no longer needed state-by-state curricular customization. It could now be sold to the entire country.

This new Gold Rush attracted people like Rupert Murdoch, not otherwise known for his concern for American pedagogy, who would go on to invest over $1 billion into an ed-tech company called Amplify, with the stated mission of selling every student in America their proprietary tablet—for only $199—along with the software and annual licensing fees.

Amplify hired hundreds of videogame designers to build educational videogames—while they and other tech entrepreneurs attempted to sell the notion that American students no longer had the attention span for traditional education. Their solution: Educate them in a more stimulating and “engaging” manner.

But let’s look more closely at that claim. ADHD rates have indeed exploded by 50 percent over the past 10 years with the CDC indicating that rates continue to rise by five percent per year. Yet many researchers and neuroscientists believe that this ADHD epidemic is a direct result of children being hyper-stimulated. Using hyper-stimulating digital content to “engage” otherwise distracted students exacerbates the problem that it endeavors to solve. It creates a vicious and addictive ADHD cycle: The more a child is stimulated, the more that child needs to keep getting stimulated in order to hold their attention.

Murdoch’s Amplify wasn’t the only dubious ed-tech cash-grab. The city of Los Angeles had entered into a $1.3 billion contract in 2014 to buy iPads loaded with Pearson educational software for all of its 650,000 K through 12 students—until the FBI investigated its contract and found that now-former Superintendent John Deasy had a close relationship with Apple and Pearson executives. (Before the deal was killed in December 2014, the Pearson platform had incomplete and essentially worthless curriculum and such feeble security restrictions students that bypassed them in weeks.)

Despite the Amplify and LA debacles, others still seek to convince naïve school administrators that screens are the educational panacea. Yet as more American schools lay off teachers while setting aside scarce budget dollars for tech, many educators and parents alike have begun to ask: Do any of these hypnotic marvels of the digital age actually produce better educational outcomes for the kids who use them?

We could look to Finland, whose school system routinely ranks toward the top globally and has chosen to skip the tech and standardized testing. Instead, Finnish students are given as many as four outdoor free-play breaks per day, regardless of the weather—while here, a sedentary American child sitting in front of a glowing screen playing edu-games while over-scheduled and stressed by standardized testing is seen as the Holy Grail.

Dr. Kentaro Toyama, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, once believed that technology in the classroom could solve the problems of modern urban education. No Luddite, he had received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale and had moved to India in 2004 to help found a new research lab for Microsoft; while there, he became interested in how computers, mobile phones and other technologies could help educate India’s billion-plus population.

Rather than finding a digital educational cure, he came to understand what he calls technology’s “Law of Amplification”: technology could help education where it’s already doing well, but it does little for mediocre educational systems. Worse, in dysfunctional schools, it “can cause outright harm.” He added: “Unfortunately, there is no technological fix…more technology only magnifies socioeconomic disparities, and the only way to avoid that is non-technological.”

The list of supporting education experts and researchers is long:

• The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said in a 2015 report that heavy users of computers in the classroom “do a lot worse in most learning outcomes” and that: “In the end, technology can amplify great teaching, but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.”

• An exhaustive meta-study conducted by Durham University in 2012 that systemically reviewed 48 studies examining technology’s impact on learning found that “technology-based interventions tend to produce just slightly lower levels of improvement when compared with other researched interventions and approaches.”

• The Alliance for Children, a consortium of some of the nation’s top educators and professors, in a 2000 report concluded: “School reform is a social challenge, not a technological problem…a high-tech agenda for children seems likely to erode our most precious long-term intellectual reserves—our children’s minds.”

• Patricia Greenfield, distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA, analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and points out that reading for pleasure among young people has decreased in recent decades, which is problematic because “studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary…in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not.”

• Education psychologist and author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds Jane Healy spent years doing research into computer use in schools and, while she expected to find that computers in the classroom would be beneficial, now feels that “time on the computer might interfere with development of everything from the young child’s motor skills to his or her ability to think logically and distinguish between reality and fantasy.”

• John Vallance, a Cambridge scholar and headmaster of Australia’s top K-through-12 school, Sydney Grammer, has said: “I think when people come to write the history of this period in education…this investment in classroom technology is going to be seen as a huge fraud.”

There has also been surprising research coming out of Canada: Students don’t even prefer e-learning over traditional education. In a 2011 study, researchers found that students actually preferred “ordinary, real-life lessons” to using technology. Those results surprised the researchers: “It is not the portrait that we expected, whereby students would embrace anything that happens on a more highly technological level. On the contrary—they really seem to like access to human interaction, a smart person at the front of the classroom.”

We are projecting our own infatuation with shiny technology, assuming our little digital natives would rather learn using gadgets—while what they crave and need is human contact with flesh-and-blood educators.

Schools need to heed this research in order to truly understand how to best nurture real intrinsic learning and not fall for the Siren song of the tech companies—and all of their hypnotic screens.

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TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

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