PASI SAHLBERG

Pasi Sahlberg is Finnish educator, author and scholar. He has worked as schoolteacher, teacher educator, researcher and policy advisor in Finland and has studied education systems and reforms around the world. In his long career in education he has served the World Bank in Washington, DC, the European Commission in Torino, Italy, and the OECD as education specialist. He currently advises several governments about education policies and reforms. He is author of best-seller book “Finnish Lessons 2.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland” and has published numerous academic and professional articles and book chapters about education. He is active contributor to global education dialogue through writings that have appeared in the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Conversation and CNN.

His professional honors and awards include the 2012 Education Award in Finland, the 2013 Grawemeyer Award in the United States, the 2014 Robert Owen Award in Scotland, and 2016 Lego Award in Denmark. He is a former Director General of CIMO (Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation)  at the Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture in Helsinki, and visiting Professor of Practice at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. He is currently Professor of Practice at the University of Helsinki and a visiting Professor of Practice at the Arizona State University. More on his website: pasisahlberg.com and Twitter: @pasi_sahlberg.

Session Title: Leadership in the Era of Facts, Myths and the Next Best Practice

“We now only rarely discover facts, instead, we download them”, Michael Lynch, The Internet of Us. This applies to journalists and also educational leaders. The perfect storm of data that is now easily available to every one of us, is taking over the place once held by facts. The collection and weighing of facts requires investigation, discernment, and judgment, while the collection and analysis of data is outsourced to machines. Knowledge acquired online is becoming a real thing for educational leaders. Pasi Sahlberg builds on these assumptions and goes on to argue, that understanding the difference between facts and myths is becoming an increasingly important feature of successful educational leadership. 

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