Using Computers To Transform Teaching and Learning: The Flight of a Butterfly Or a Bullet?* by larrycuban

7/7/2016

As regular readers of this blog know, I have embarked on another project examining "best cases" of teachers, schools, and districts integrating computers into daily activities.  After four months of classroom observations, interviews with teachers and principals, and much reading I have begun to think of this project as a possible book. Much remains to be done, however, before it becomes one. In the fall, I will visit more classrooms and schools to do observations and interviews. I will do more reading of national surveys, case studies, and rigorous inquiries into what teachers and students do with devices. But the makings of a book are there in my mind.

So here is part of a proposal that I have sent to a publisher to see if they are interested. Subsequent posts will elaborate on other parts of this book proposal.

Overview and Rationale for Proposed Book

For over 30 years, I have examined the adoption and use of computers in schools (Teachers and Machines, 1986; Oversold and Underused, 2001, Inside the Black Box, 2013). I looked at the policy hype and over-promising accompanying new technologies in each decade. The question I asked was: what happens in schools and classrooms after the school board and superintendent adopt a policy of buying and deploying new technologies to improve schooling? This is the central question for any reform-minded policymaker, entrepreneur, parent, and practitioner because if teaching practices fail to change in the desired direction embedded in the policy then the chances of any changes in student performance are diminished considerably. Thus, in pursuing the issue of changes in classroom lessons in books, articles, and my blog, I moved back and forth between adopted policies for using computers, their classroom implementation, and shifts in teaching practices.

I described and analyzed computers in schools and classrooms across the U.S. including the highly touted Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay area. I tracked how these advocates and donors were often disappointed in how little school and classroom practice changed, anemic results in student achievement, and uncertainties in getting the right jobs after graduation, given the claims accompanying these devices and software.

There have been, however, occasional bright spots in individual teachers thoroughly integrating laptops and tablets into their practice and moving from teacher- to student-centered classrooms. And there were scattered instances of schools and districts adopting technologies wholesale and slowly altering cultures and structures to improve how teachers teach and students learn. I documented those occasional exemplars but such instances of classroom, school, and district integration were isolated and infrequent.

What slowly became clear to me over the years of studying the use of computers to improve how teachers teach and students learn and attain the overall purposes of public schooling is that policymakers have avoided asking basic questions accompanying any policy intended to reshape classroom practice. I concluded that those questions and their answers are crucial in understanding the role that computers in schools perform when it comes to teaching and learning.

This conclusion is behind my writing this book.

Reform-driven policymakers, entrepreneurs, researchers, practitioners, and parents have sought substantial changes over the past three decades in classrooms, schools, and districts to transform schooling while improving student outcomes. Yet, too often, they either avoided the inevitable steps that need to occur for such changes to materialize in schools or hastily leap-frogged over important ones. Four simple questions capture the essential steps in going from adopted policy to classroom practice.

1. Did policies aimed at improving student performance get fully, moderately, or partially implemented?
2. When implemented fully, did they change the content and practice of teaching?
3. Did changed classroom practices account for what students learned?
4. Did what students learn meet the intended policy goals?

These questions apply to innovations aimed at improving student academic performance such as creating small high schools and launching charter schools to states and districts adopting Common Core standards, competency-based learning and project-based teaching. Most importantly for this book, these questions pertain to making new technologies from laptops to hand-held devices not only accessible to every student but also expecting teachers to regularly use computers in lessons.

The questions emphasize the critical first step of actually implementing the adopted policy. Policies are not self-implementing. They require resources, technical assistance, staff development, and administrators and teacher to work together. This is especially so for teachers who are gatekeepers determining what enters the classroom door.

So without full or moderate implementation of a policy aimed at improving student performance, there is not much sense in pursuing answers to the other questions. Evidence of putting the policy into classroom practice is essential to determining the degree to which a policy is effective (or ineffective).

Once evidence of a policy’s implementation in schools and classrooms is available then the question of whether teaching practices have changed arises. This question gets at the nexus between teaching and learning that has been taken for granted in U.S. schools since the introduction of tax-supported public education nearly two centuries ago: Change teaching and then student learning will change. This is (and has been) the taken-for-granted belief driving reformers for the past century. Determining the degree to which teaching practices have changed in the desired direction and which have remained stable is essential.

The third question closes this circle of teaching producing learning by getting at what students have actually learned as a consequence of altered teaching practices. In the past half-century, policymakers have adopted measures of desired student outcomes (e.g., test scores, graduation rates, attendance, engagement in lessons). They assume that these measures capture what students have, indeed, learned. If teaching practices have changed in the desired direction, then changes in student outcomes (i.e., learning) can be attributed to those changes in classroom practices.

The final question returns to the immediate and long-term purposes of the adopted policy and asks for an evaluation of its intended and unintended outcomes. Immediate purposes might have concentrated on student test scores and graduation rates. Long-term purposes, the overall goals for tax-supported public schools, refer to job preparation, civic engagement, and producing independent and whole human beings.

These questions establish clear linkages between reform-driven policies and teaching practice. They steer this proposed book.

What if, however, policymakers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and parents looked not only at failed uses of classroom computers but also exemplary instances that have actually altered teaching practices to achieve policy ends? Examining how such “best cases” happened and their stability (or lack of it) might unlock the crucial next step of assessing changes in teaching practices and student outcomes.

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