How and Why I Research Exemplars of Technology Integration
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, over-promising, and predictions 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. In books, articles, and my blog, I moved back and forth between policy and practice.
In these decades, champions of new technologies in schools believed deeply that the traditional goals of tax-supported public schools (i.e., building citizens, preparing graduates for a labor market, and making whole human beings) could be achieved through new electronic devices. They believed that hardware and software would, if not transform, surely alter classroom teaching, improve students’ academic performance, and prepare graduates for an entirely different workplace than their parents faced.
In research during these decades, I described and analyzed computers in schools and classrooms across the U.S. I tracked how these high-tech advocates and donors were often disappointed in how little school and classroom practice changed in the direction they sought, the anemic results in student achievement, and uncertainties in getting the right jobs after graduation, given the claims accompanying these new technologies.
I also documented occasional instances where individual teachers thoroughly integrated laptops and tablets into their practice and moved from teacher- to student-centered classrooms. And there were scattered cases of schools and districts adopting technologies wholesale and slowly altering cultures and structures to improve how teachers teach and students learn. While isolated and infrequent, nonetheless, I found these occasional exemplars of classroom, school, and district integration as important, if not, puzzling in their isolation from mainstream practices. In doing all of this research I became intimately familiar with nearly all that had been written about computers in schools.
Literature on computers in schools
Researchers, policy advocates, practitioners have created an immense literature How and Why I Research Exemplars of Technology Integration | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:
