Review of The flight of the butterfly or the path of a bullet: Using technology to transform teaching and learning

The title of Larry Cuban’s latest insightful and timely book, his third on education technology over a 30-year period, takes on a certain poignancy after the recent Parkland, Florida, school shooting of February 2018, another in a series of tragic losses of life in American schools. Cuban, who is professor emeritus at Stanford University, draws his title from a line by the great explorer of classroom life Philip Jackson, who notes that the course of educational progress emulates butterflies rather than bullets. Cuban follows that butterfly path around a series of Silicon Valley schools situated among the California poppies. He alights on the classrooms of 41 exemplary teachers across 12 charter and public schools and six districts. In each case, he follows the course of a single lesson, closely observing how the teachers integrate technology into their teaching, after which he asks them about the difference that technology makes for their teaching. Download the review and read more...