Let Students Use Their Phones
An argument against the “no phones in class” policy.
At least 80% of schools have implemented a cell phone policy (Common Sense Media, 2019) and California recently passed legislation that allows school districts to restrict or prohibit device use in class. I‘ve taught with a hard ban on phones in my classroom and I’ve taught with phones as an everyday tool. I’m convinced phones have their place.
The usual arguments AGAINST phones tend to be…
- students will get distracted from their learning
- students won’t get the benefits of pen and paper
- screen time is fundamentally bad and having time off of phones is good
I agree with every one of those arguments. Phones are perhaps the most distracting object I can imagine and when I banned them in my classroom it was a clear message that my class was not the time and place for Tik Tok videos and texting friends.
When I banned phones, I was clear: phones should be in bags or in a pocket and they should stay there.
If I saw a phone, I took it. If it was an emergency and the student needed to take a call from a family member then of course I gave students the benefit of the doubt. But otherwise, there were no 3 warnings, no countdown, just me politely but firmly asking for the phone or for the student to put it in my desk drawer and get back to what they were doing.
For the most part, it worked. Students knew not to have phones out in my class and when a student did get caught with a phone out they were frustrated but often their peers would remind them that I had set clear expectations. Three times that year a student defied my ask and said no when I asked them to hand over their phone. Two times I was able to handle it on my own without disrupting class and gave the student some time to calm down. In the other instance, the student shouted that they hated me and that I was the worst teacher for taking phones away in class. I stopped engaging in the moment and after class got the support of security and principal to confiscate the phone until the parent came to pick it up at the end of the day. For the most part, the policy was a success.
Ok, so why not stick with it?
Even acknowledging that holding students accountable for building good habits is important, how much time did I want to spend on policing vs. teaching?
I was relatively new to teaching, but I know from talking to colleagues that maintaining a no phones policy is always work. According to a Common Sense Media survey, one fourth of teachers find cell phone policies difficult to follow. (Common Sense Media, 2019) Keeping track of which students had problems having their phones out, following up with students after class, sending emails and phone calls home; this is a normal part of being a teacher but I have to factor that time and energy into the value of a strict phone policy.
Was I even helping to build good habits or was I just taking away their opportunity to learn to self-regulate from natural consequences?
I didn’t want students to have good phone habits in my class but never learn for themselves to manage their phone use. Surely, they’d have an even harder time in college or a future job since they wouldn’t be policed forever and the consequences would be much more severe. A survey of college students found that 75% of students feel that digital devices help them learn more effectively and 94% of students want to use cellphones in school for academic purposes. Students also want more interactive, digital course materials. About twice as many students said they learn more effectively from an interactive text than a static PDF course pack. Sixty-eight percent think quizzes should be embedded within digital course materials, and 62 percent said the same about videos. Just 3 percent said they would prefer not to have interactive course materials. (Top Hat, 2021) How would my students be ready for a future in college or work if they weren’t given the opportunity to learn responsible cell phone use?
Was I treating the underlying problem or was I treating a symptom?
I didn’t want to erase the symptom of phones only for students to nod off or doodle or use another coping strategy when they were avoiding the stressful work of a 7 period school day. From talking to my students I had the feeling that the students who had the biggest problems with phone use had underlying problems with motivation, anxiety, and focus that weren’t solved when they learned not to have their phone out. Those underlying problems still kept them from learning and they found a new way to cope.
I can’t shake the notion that future classrooms are sure to involve more technology not less.
Is fighting phones a productive battle?
The year after my strictest phone policy year, my district went 1:1 on devices for students. Every kid had a chromebook and edtech was making it possible for students to learn more interactively, get language supports with tools like text to speech and translation, and learn important digital skills like identifying credible sources and creating presentations. I had already been creating student-facing lesson plans that made learning goals transparent and now I expected students that were absent or missed work to consult online materials. When Covid-19 put us on lockdown all of these digital tools were amplified. When we came back from lockdown over a year later, they were the default in my classroom. There were way too many benefits to imagine teaching with slides on a TV and students taking pen and paper notes. We weren’t going back. I started www.curyte.com and all of my lessons were digital and student-led and they worked as well on mobile as they did on a chromebook, with much less time for students to get ready and much less space taken up on desks.
Fighting phones started to make less sense than fighting bad work habits and underlying motivational issues. So I stopped.
My new policy was that phones and devices were to be used for learning and that anything outside of that was not allowed during class time. I still have some defiance. I still have the work of emailing home. But I’m no longer fighting phones for the sake of phones. Instead, I’m doing my best to address the underlying issues with students and families without negating all of the benefits of phones in the classroom.
More importantly, my students are learning responsible phone use.
I introduce graphing by having students monitor their own screen time, collect data and compare it to data sets from Pew Research. Then we talk how screen time is linked to depression and how things like doom scrolling on socials can be unhealthy habits. From there its about bettering screen time habits — kids self assess what level of accountability they need. They can choose to drop the phone in my desk drawer at the start of class or if they want to use it for academics they can but they lose that privilege if they use it for nonacademic purposes in class. They also get positive reinforcement because we congratulate people that make it a habit to use their phones effectively.
