Best of the carnival

The 62nd Carnival of Education is up on The Magic School Bus. As usual, it is stuffed with goodies. Here are the ones that stand out to me.

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The 2 Cents Worth blog explores an idea he calls Flat Classrooms

What about an education system that is challenged to prepare children for their future &mdahs; and it’s not their father’s future. So what about a flat classroom? Traditional education has been an environment of hills. The teacher could rely on gravity to support the flow of curriculum down to the learners. But as much as we might like to pretend, we (teachers) are no longer on top of the hill. The hill is practically gone.

For the first time in history, children are more comfortable, knowledgeable, and literate than their parents about an innovation central to society. (Tapscot)

In many cases, students communicate more, construct original content more, and more often collaborate virtually with other people, than do their teachers. Those teachers who pretend to stand on higher ground, appear, to many of their students, to be standing on quicksand.

A polar opposite perspective comes from Bacon Bits who posts this screed: Obedience: In Danger of Extinction?

Scholar's Notebook links to news about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's disallusionment with The failed promise of small learning communities

In marked contrast to its splashy announcements of large grants (totaling $1 billion) to fund some 1500 'small learning communities' across the country, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has quietly concluded: they don't work.

At the Gates Foundation, early grants went to utopian and communitarian movements but we moved away from that because it does not work,' foundation spokesman David Ferrero said late last month. Ferrero spoke at a conference on high school reform sponsored by the Center for Education at the National Academies of Science.

Truly a case study in the risks of chasing educational fads.

Adventures in Ethics and Science has written a series of posts about science education. Here's a teaser from How to fix science education in the U.S.

Maybe it's time to re-examine what we require of people looking to be science teachers.

Maybe we need to find an alternative route to credential those with serious scientific training who want to be science teachers. Keep the student teaching under supervision, but replace the standard complement of ed courses with pedagogical training that focuses on the particular teaching issues science teachers will face in their teaching assignments (e.g., engaging students with weak math skills, or setting up meaningful lab experiments of lecture demonstrations on a limited budget). Give the prospective teachers opportunities to be reflective about their pedagogy and to share strategies with other science teachers. But cut out the 'bunny courses' and stick to the stuff that helps scientists to be effective teachers of science.

The others posts in this series are

• Study suggests U.S. science teaching falls short on content
• Not-entirely-random bullets on science teaching as I rush to class.
• How important is effective teaching to science professors anyway?

Jenny D. recently posted a similar query on her blog, Tought Experiments, that triggered a whole lot of discussion. Sounds like a ripe meme.

Finally, I just don't want to believe this. But here it is, with some evidence: It actually IS harder to get into college today!