Fulbright Finland

Finland Fulbright is one of the most competitive of all the Fulbright Distinguished Teacher Awards (DTA) programs. Pascack Valley Regional High School District is the second district in New Jersey in the history of the DTA program to produce a Fulbright Finland DTA. Fulbright Finland is unique in many ways: this is one of the oldest, well-established and well-connected, most sought-after programs among all of the Fulbright's DTA programs.

The Finnish model of education is celebrated worldwide.

    • Finland's new core curriculum and the national goals stipulated in the Education Act and in the Government Decree has defined the following seven areas of extended, cross-cutting (common to all school subjects) competencies based on 21st-century skills. They are:
        • Thinking and learning to learn;
        • Cultural literacy, interaction, and expression;
        • Taking care of oneself, everyday life skills, safety;
        • Multiliteracy;
        • ICT competence (technology);
        • Working life skills and entrepreneurship;
        • Participation, influence, and responsibility for a sustainable future (Niemi, Multisilta, Lipponen & Vivitsou , 2014, p. 28-29).
    • Finland offers alternative ways to think about solutions to existing chronic educational problems in the US, England, and other Nordic countries, such as high school dropout rates, early teacher attrition, and inadequate special education (Sahlberg, 2015).
    • Finland focuses on the principles of equity, creativity, and the ‘joy of teaching’ that produced their high-quality systems in the first place (Adamson, 2016).
    • Finland’s education reform strategy has been driven by a shared vision or “big dream” of a more equitable society in which every student would have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location (Partanen, 2011).
    • Finland set high standards for itself in comparison with the performance and practices of other education systems in the run-up to its own dramatic emergence as one of the world’s top performers (Doucet et. al., 2018, p. 155).
    • Teachers in Finland are autonomous professionals, respected for making a difference to young people’s lives. Teacher education in Finland strongly research-based (Crouch, 2015).
    • Most recently, Finland has made project-based and cross-disciplinary learning central to all student learning experiences, posing real-life problems to students that require them, for example, to think like a scientist, think like a historian and think like a philosopher, all at the same time (Phenomenon-Based Learning).
    • Finnish schools also owe their fame to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, a report published by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) that compares the competencies of 15-year-olds in about 70 countries in reading, math, and science. Finland consistently ranks among the top 3, sharing honors with education superpowers, such as China, Korea, and Singapore, which are associated with rigid discipline and rote learning.
    • Finnish schools are credited for redesigning learning according to how innovation occurs. In addition to emphasizing collaborative work, Finnish schools have a different conception of knowledge than the traditional one (Paine & Schleicher, 2011).
    • Finnish teachers don't think of knowledge as a cumulative store of objective information. It is more about the skills in acquiring, utilizing, diffusing and creating knowledge that is important for economic progress and social change (Sahlberg, 2015).
    • Finnish system shows an incredible collaboration between administrators, teachers, and all other stakeholders (Andere, 2013).
    • Finland has no private schools. None! As a result, the entire nation is vested in the success of its public schools (DuFour, 2015).
    • Finnish system of education gives hope to those who are losing their faith in public education and whether it can be improved (Sahlberg, 2015).