Physics Professor Visits Finland, Studies Best-Practice Physics Education Model
Dan MacIsaac, associate professor of physics whose research interest is physics education, completed a year-long sabbatical during which he collected material for a forthcoming book, Fostering Learning in Physics.
He was invited to Finland as a visiting scholar to the Physics Education group of the Helsinki University Department of Physics to observe and participate in a program that most Finnish universities use to prepare their physics teachers. As part of the program, doctoral candidates debate scholars from all over the world to earn the equivalent of an American Ph.D. To be invited, scholars must be actively researching and publishing in physics education.
“I was interested in going to Finland,” said MacIsaac, “because their students consistently place in the top three countries in several international student assessments.” According to a recent Time magazine article, the global assessments to which MacIsaac refers include the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
MacIsaac, who was interviewed for the Time article, “Finland's Educational Success? The Anti–Tiger Mother Approach,” said that Finland’s approach to preparing physics teachers is very different from American preparation. “Their teachers are immersed in the study of physics,” said MacIsaac, “but part of their college curriculum is to delve deeply into the physics that’s taught at elementary- and secondary-school levels. All too often, U.S. physics teachers have been prepared for general science, and they take on a physics class with much less in-depth conceptual knowledge of the exact topics they are teaching.”
MacIsaac, who has served as editor of the column “WebSites” for the Physics Teacher since 2003, has helped to promote the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP). RTOP is a rubric that helps teachers determine whether their method of teaching includes methods that have been shown to improve student comprehension of physics.
“Another reason I was interested in exploring the way Finland teaches physics,” said MacIsaac, “is that, over the last 20 years, the country has been reinventing itself as a technologically-based economy. Now, they’re the home of Nokia, and it was a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, who developed the Linux operating system. It’s important to study very different and successful education models to gain insights into improving our own teacher-preparation programs—and into our schools as well.”
He was invited to Finland as a visiting scholar to the Physics Education group of the Helsinki University Department of Physics to observe and participate in a program that most Finnish universities use to prepare their physics teachers. As part of the program, doctoral candidates debate scholars from all over the world to earn the equivalent of an American Ph.D. To be invited, scholars must be actively researching and publishing in physics education.
“I was interested in going to Finland,” said MacIsaac, “because their students consistently place in the top three countries in several international student assessments.” According to a recent Time magazine article, the global assessments to which MacIsaac refers include the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
MacIsaac, who was interviewed for the Time article, “Finland's Educational Success? The Anti–Tiger Mother Approach,” said that Finland’s approach to preparing physics teachers is very different from American preparation. “Their teachers are immersed in the study of physics,” said MacIsaac, “but part of their college curriculum is to delve deeply into the physics that’s taught at elementary- and secondary-school levels. All too often, U.S. physics teachers have been prepared for general science, and they take on a physics class with much less in-depth conceptual knowledge of the exact topics they are teaching.”
MacIsaac, who has served as editor of the column “WebSites” for the Physics Teacher since 2003, has helped to promote the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP). RTOP is a rubric that helps teachers determine whether their method of teaching includes methods that have been shown to improve student comprehension of physics.
“Another reason I was interested in exploring the way Finland teaches physics,” said MacIsaac, “is that, over the last 20 years, the country has been reinventing itself as a technologically-based economy. Now, they’re the home of Nokia, and it was a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, who developed the Linux operating system. It’s important to study very different and successful education models to gain insights into improving our own teacher-preparation programs—and into our schools as well.”
Media Contact:
Mary A. Durlak, Senior Writer | 7168783517 | durlakma@buffalostate.edu