I teach high school at a well resourced public school with 2,000 students. Last year, after a thoughtful planning and roll out, our administration came out with an "off your body/out of sight" policy for all classrooms. We spent time during our opening days learning the policy and coming up with strategies to implement it school wide. The impact was immediate and game changing. Until it wasn't - maybe around December? I'm positive that there are a few Super Teachers out there who have the skill and fortitude to keep up their vigilance and maintain the policy, but for the merely very good teachers of the world, it's just impossible. At a faculty meeting in the spring, at a small table that included the usual range of teacher personalities ('it's all about relationships", "we need to empower students to make the right choices", "they need clear, consistent, real consequences", "let's ask students what they think") the feeling on phones was unanimous: Ban them. Now. I think any money we are spending on ANY initiative to impact student learning and mental health would be better spent on Yondr pouches. Good, smart, effective teachers and administrators and parents are all trying to address this problem - it's incredibly hard when we are dealing with such an omnipresent, highly engaging, distracting device that has become integral to how students navigate their lives. I just don't see how half measures can make an impact.
Thank you so much for this summary, which comes at a time when many school districts (including ours) are reckoning with how to implement phone policies.
I’m really interested in hearing more success stories about ideas that worked well. I would love to see people who are in charge of implementing procedures reading everything they can get their hands on about creative solutions: easy to implement, hard to implement, weird, boring, complicated, simple, expensive, cheap, whatever. Just increasing the pool of ideas to chew on and experiment with could be much more productive than constantly enumerating the factors that make it “hard” to make these changes. Yep, it might be hard. Acknowledged. It might also be necessary, and we can do hard things.
One example is this school (boarding, so they had more control) that replaced smartphones with Light Phones and had great results: https://archive.is/OIbbN A decisive and simple solution. Of course, that exact tactic would be too expensive for most schools but I would have never even thought of that in a million years. So just getting our minds thinking in new directions would be useful.
Finally, a quibble: The section titled “And are these policies effective?” focused not on effectiveness, but on the ability of the schools to *enforce* the policies. I would argue that effectiveness cannot be measured until enforcement is ensured. You can’t fairly analyze whether a tactic works or not if it’s not even really happening—that’s like saying “Tums don’t work for heartburn,” and quietly murmuring that you didn’t even take the aforementioned Tums. And enforcement is another ball of wax that I have opinions on, but that should be separated out from the concept of effectiveness.
But thank you thank you thank you for all the work you've put into this topic! So glad this is being talked about seriously in the larger arena now.
We banned phones completely at our school. It has been very effective, not perfect, but effective. I made a little vid of how we did it - https://youtu.be/tQwQKIpIGeE
Great summary! And hit upon a key point: “A statewide mandate, for example, will do little if the burden rests entirely on teachers to implement it.”
To me, it seems like there needs to be district and school-level conversations with the entire community on how to approach cell phones. My kids are only in elementary, but I grew up without cell phones, and I think there can be a way forward but need to some collaborative, community-level problem solving.
As a parent nope to all of the above. Other kids flunking because of excessive phone use is not my problem. I should be able to communicate with my child about emergencies whether at home or at school. Ex: I’d prefer to know if there’s a gunman at the school before the school/police waste time alerting parents of an active shooter situation. Or maybe my child’s father is tweaking again and I need to tell them where and how I can pick them up. 🤷
I invite you to check out how the Mercer Island School district is rolling out their phone-free initiative. They are taking a more holistic approach and including parent/community in their digital wellness education.
I teach high school at a well resourced public school with 2,000 students. Last year, after a thoughtful planning and roll out, our administration came out with an "off your body/out of sight" policy for all classrooms. We spent time during our opening days learning the policy and coming up with strategies to implement it school wide. The impact was immediate and game changing. Until it wasn't - maybe around December? I'm positive that there are a few Super Teachers out there who have the skill and fortitude to keep up their vigilance and maintain the policy, but for the merely very good teachers of the world, it's just impossible. At a faculty meeting in the spring, at a small table that included the usual range of teacher personalities ('it's all about relationships", "we need to empower students to make the right choices", "they need clear, consistent, real consequences", "let's ask students what they think") the feeling on phones was unanimous: Ban them. Now. I think any money we are spending on ANY initiative to impact student learning and mental health would be better spent on Yondr pouches. Good, smart, effective teachers and administrators and parents are all trying to address this problem - it's incredibly hard when we are dealing with such an omnipresent, highly engaging, distracting device that has become integral to how students navigate their lives. I just don't see how half measures can make an impact.
Thank you so much for this summary, which comes at a time when many school districts (including ours) are reckoning with how to implement phone policies.
I’m really interested in hearing more success stories about ideas that worked well. I would love to see people who are in charge of implementing procedures reading everything they can get their hands on about creative solutions: easy to implement, hard to implement, weird, boring, complicated, simple, expensive, cheap, whatever. Just increasing the pool of ideas to chew on and experiment with could be much more productive than constantly enumerating the factors that make it “hard” to make these changes. Yep, it might be hard. Acknowledged. It might also be necessary, and we can do hard things.
One example is this school (boarding, so they had more control) that replaced smartphones with Light Phones and had great results: https://archive.is/OIbbN A decisive and simple solution. Of course, that exact tactic would be too expensive for most schools but I would have never even thought of that in a million years. So just getting our minds thinking in new directions would be useful.
Finally, a quibble: The section titled “And are these policies effective?” focused not on effectiveness, but on the ability of the schools to *enforce* the policies. I would argue that effectiveness cannot be measured until enforcement is ensured. You can’t fairly analyze whether a tactic works or not if it’s not even really happening—that’s like saying “Tums don’t work for heartburn,” and quietly murmuring that you didn’t even take the aforementioned Tums. And enforcement is another ball of wax that I have opinions on, but that should be separated out from the concept of effectiveness.
But thank you thank you thank you for all the work you've put into this topic! So glad this is being talked about seriously in the larger arena now.
We banned phones completely at our school. It has been very effective, not perfect, but effective. I made a little vid of how we did it - https://youtu.be/tQwQKIpIGeE
Great summary! And hit upon a key point: “A statewide mandate, for example, will do little if the burden rests entirely on teachers to implement it.”
To me, it seems like there needs to be district and school-level conversations with the entire community on how to approach cell phones. My kids are only in elementary, but I grew up without cell phones, and I think there can be a way forward but need to some collaborative, community-level problem solving.
As a parent nope to all of the above. Other kids flunking because of excessive phone use is not my problem. I should be able to communicate with my child about emergencies whether at home or at school. Ex: I’d prefer to know if there’s a gunman at the school before the school/police waste time alerting parents of an active shooter situation. Or maybe my child’s father is tweaking again and I need to tell them where and how I can pick them up. 🤷
I invite you to check out how the Mercer Island School district is rolling out their phone-free initiative. They are taking a more holistic approach and including parent/community in their digital wellness education.