Pasi Sahlberg - FinnishED Leadership: Four Big, Inexpensive Ideas to Transform Education

Pasi Sahlberg, who introduced the world to the remarkable educational system in Finland, delineates four lessons that can be useful to educational leaders throughout the world. Sahlbergs clear, cogent, and conversational presentation is both powerful and timely.

Howard Gardner

Author of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed

About 25 years ago, two of us had a visiting scholar from Finland who wanted to know about cooperative learning. When he returned home he invited us to do workshops on the teachers role in structuring cooperative learning and why it is effective in increasing achievement, building relationships in the classroom, and encouraging positive mental health. Several years later, a group of Minnesota legislators met with Pasi Sahlberg in Minneapolis where Pasi also invited us to attend. He turned to us and said that cooperative learning, as he writes in this book, was being used in every school in Finland. After reading this greatly important book we think we need to go back to Finland to see that ourselves.

David W. and Roger T. Johnson

Professors of Education, University of Minnesota

Pasi Sahlberg is probably the worlds most knowledgeable scholar on across-the-globe education and teaching. Here he writes a primer on Finnish education, making clear that imported teaching and learning practices have greatly enhanced indigenous ones. The Finnish culture of inclusive leadership will give policymakers in many countries pause. They tutored me on leadership as culture while I was helping them borrow peer coachingto my lasting benefit.

Bruce Joyce

Author of Models of Teaching

This short, wonderful book captures the essence of Finlands best education practices. Sahlberg clearly and compellingly describes simple steps to improve learning and teaching for all students. Every superintendent, school board member, principal, and teacher leader should read this book and follow its recommendations.

Tony Wagner

Expert in Residence, Harvard University iLab and

Author of The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators

Pasi Sahlberg, an original thinker and keen observer of schools worldwide, has done it again. In FinnishED Leadership, he builds on his best-selling Finnish Lessons with a lucid explication of the real leadership lessons we can take from Finlands schools. This book includes strategies that principals, teachers, and school leaders can pursue to advance recess as a student right, champion equity as the foundation of learning, implement the genuine lessons from Finnish schools instead of the urban legends, and encourage the use of small data as an antidote to quantification, correlation, and algorithms. The Comenius Oath, which begins, As a teacher I am engaged in educating the next generation, which is one of the most important human tasks, makes the book worthwhile by itself. An engaging, powerful, and elegant read.

James Harvey

Executive Director, National Superintendents Roundtable

Co-author of The Superintendents Fieldbook

As my state grapples with growing economic inequality and an aging and declining population, creating strong schools that support child well-being and nurture the capabilities of all of our children has become an imperativenot just for human dignity but also for sustainable economic prosperity. This book is less about Finland than about how education systems generally can engage in consistent development of human potential. Sahlbergs emphasis on well-being and on the essential value of educators professional capital to systems improvement is a hopeful and refreshing break from failed narratives that have exacerbated equity challenges and incentivized narrow, test-focused instruction.

Rebecca Holcombe

Secretary of Education, Vermont

Every school system has its own unique strengths and weaknesses shaped by historic, political, and economic forces. Despite the success of the Finnish system, it is a mistake to emulate it in its entirety but rather, as Pasi Sahlberg points out in