Cleverlands Quotes

“One assumption is that intelligence is not a fixed entity, but something that develops (so you might not be ready, but that doesn’t mean you are unable). The other is more subtle; in acknowledging that different children are ready at different ages, he is recognising that talents and abilities develop at different rates in different people.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“On the other hand, those with a growth mindset are motivated to seek out challenge, as they believe that their intelligence can grow through taking on challenges and working hard at them.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“In America, two-thirds of children who can’t read by the end of fourth grade end up in prison or on welfare.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“If they enjoy reading and are motivated to read outside of school, they are more likely to become expert readers than those who were put off books by being forced to learn to read before they were ready. When I was in a Finnish primary school, I peeked my head into one classroom to see Grade 1 children silently reading to themselves.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“information students receive is through self-direction rather than from teachers, is not as effective at getting children to understand new knowledge and new concepts (I will come to its other effects later on).210 John Hattie synthesised the results of eight meta-analyses, including 285 studies on the effectiveness”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“Learning enables one to become a better, not just a smarter, person. The ultimate purpose of learning is to self-perfect and to contribute to others at the same time.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“A clumsy bird that flies first will get to the forest earlier. (Chinese proverb)”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“Other studies have shown that not only do East Asians persist longer in the face of challenge, they are also more likely to see it out. Not only that, they are actually spurred on to work harder in the face of failure – the opposite reaction to typical Western students.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“Stevenson and Stigler – psychologists who studied Japanese and Chinese education in the early 1990s – recount an experiment they attempted to carry out on persistence in Japanese and American children. Their intention was to give students from each country a maths problem that was unsolvable in order to see how long they would keep attempting it for. However, Stevenson and Stigler weren't able to complete their study, because the Japanese teachers convinced them to drop it after trying it out with a few children. They'd found that the children refused to give up, and had carried on attempting to solve the problem for far longer than it was fair to let them try for.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“If a Western country were to introduce streaming or school selection at such a young age, for example, they may not find that it incentivised all children to work harder and raise their game, as it seems to in Singapore. This is because more people in Western countries believe intelligence is fixed, and would therefore be more likely to assume that failure in tests and allocation to bottom sets was something they had little control over, rather than something they could change through putting in more effort.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“These few bad apples are dealt with, without the imposition of a controlling system that makes everyone feel rotten.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“Where schools or education systems can find individuals who are already intrinsically motivated to do the work required, or who already have a strong sense of purpose and belief in the importance of education (and who have therefore internalised the same goals as the school), good things come of it: positive work-related attitudes, effective performance, job satisfaction and psychological well-being. In order for this to happen, teachers need to feel that they are autonomous, and they are performing certain actions, like professional development, because they want to, not because they are being forced to. This is what makes Singapore's teaching career structure so clever.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“People develop at different paces at different life stages. Many of us are late bloomers. Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Ray Kroc? Sim Wong Hoo? These are famous personalities who have made it big in life despite not having a university degree. They made many mistakes but they did not give up. They worked hard. They persevered. Each and every one of us are born with unique strengths and talents. When someone is not good in academic studies, it does not mean that he is also not good in other areas. And so, in my opinion, academic grades are just one way of measuring a person's ability or knowledgeability.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“Associate Professor Irene Ng from the Department of Social Work at the National University of Singapore (NUS) explains that 'As you put students into finer and finer categories, their social circle becomes more and more isolated... Even if they have good intentions to do so, their social circle is just so limited they will have limited empathy and understanding to help effectively people who are different to themselves.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“I learnt that in teaching young children the concept of number, you should start with the concrete, then move to the pictorial, before finally representing numbers in the abstract. I learnt that children should be encouraged to articulate their processes, and feed back to each other on whether they are right or wrong, and why. And I learnt that this is so children understand number concepts, not just procedures, because (though not only because) the PSLE tests understanding, not just memorisation. As I was chatting to the professor in the car as she gave me a lift to the station, she also expounded on the importance of teacher-student relationships – 'you can't touch their brain until you have touched their heart'.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“the European Americans played down the amount of effort they’d made on the practice task, which the authors suggest was to protect their self-image should they then do badly.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“I learnt that in teaching young children the concept of number, you should start with the concrete, then move to the pictorial, before finally representing numbers in the abstract.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“As articulated by Janet, the Canadian approach to identifying children who are struggling with reading and catching them up is based on this idea that all children can achieve with the right input. As expressed by Bob in his office, the pan-Canadian decision to delay even setting (let alone streaming) until high school means that no one’s options are closed down at a young age due to them not having reached the required stage of development yet.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“Catching children up on their reading in the first few years of elementary school seems to be a big focus here, as it was in Finland. Teachers”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“I was saddened by a poem I saw stuck up on the wall of an English reading and writing club that I visited. It was written by a 10-year-old girl, and was titled ‘Exams’. All exams are significant, And I am going to FAINT! For my poor mid-term scores Which drive grandma dizzy And make my grandpa crazy. My world is not fantasy, And my mind is in vacancy. My teachers are getting chilly, And thinking if I am silly. My classmate is not a bully Just making unfriendly raillery. I am so afraid of the terrible shouting And endless moaning. How I wish I have nubility, To improve my ability. From now on I get to know That life isn’t interesting And I must be hard-working.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“If you do poorly in your gaokao, your chances of finding a marriage partner are severely reduced.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“East Asian educational culture and what Dweck calls ‘growth mindset’. Growth mindset describes the beliefs that people have when they think that intellectual abilities can be cultivated and developed through application and instruction, and it can be contrasted with a fixed mindset, which”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“Which mindset children have has huge implications for how they behave when faced with challenge.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“Ng, Pomerantz and Lam found a parallel effect – Chinese students’ performance improved after failure; Americans’ did not.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“More unusually, the government also made all private schools a part of this system, meaning they became funded by the government and were not allowed to charge fees or select students based on ability. Contrary to popular belief, this means that private schools do still exist in Finland, in that some schools are run by non-state organisations such as the church, but they lack the economic, social or academic selectivity common to private schools in other nations.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“We have, by the way, counted if the young boy, for example, will drop out, he will be excluded from active society; he will cost at least 1,000,000 euros.’40”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“the Finnish language has great orthographic transparency. This means that in Finnish, sounds and the letters that represent them tend to correspond on a 1:1 basis, which can be picked up by children fairly easily with enough exposure. In”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“Finns have demonstrated their love of reading by annually borrowing an average of 18 books per person from libraries, more than any other country in the world. We”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers

“Children don’t do formal learning at desks in preschool or kindergarten, they learn through playing.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world’s education superpowers