Student Autonomy and Phones in the Classroom
As a professor, I am committed to helping young adults develop meta-cognitive skills, self-reflection, and autonomy. That means I take every opportunity to empower them with student-centered pedagogical approaches, instead of implementing an authoritarian I’m-in-charge-so-do-what-I-say ethos.
One example of how I implement this is regarding the question of phone use in the classroom. Every teacher knows that phone addiction is a major impediment to teaching and learning, and many of us have moved to restrict or outright ban their use by our students during class time.
My approach is different. Instead of filling my syllabus with rules for them to follow, in the first week of class, I have the students draw up their own document with the classroom guidelines for the semester. As part of that effort, they make their own attendance policy, late assignment policy, norms for in-class discussions, and so forth. I also ask them to make an explicit technology policy.
Writing up this document takes up all of one class period. I break the students into groups that handle drafting different parts of a shared Google Doc, which they then all review and edit as homework after the class. At the beginning of the next class meeting, we ratify and adopt the document. (I reserve the right to intervene and make edits if anything seems unfair or inappropriate, but I don’t remember ever having to do so.)
Two years ago, I added an additional component to this exercise. I asked my daughter (who was an incoming college freshman at the time) to review five TedTalks and other videos that I found online about how phone use is detrimental to learning and the value of unplugging from technology. I asked her to tell me which of the five was the most convincing to her, and she selected the one below. Since that time, I have included this video in my syllabus as a homework assignment just before writing up the classroom rules.
The above exercise usually results in the students creating what I think is a reasonable technology policy. Listening to comments made during the rules-making discussion, it seems that they acknowledge they are addicted to the phone and want some kind of structure in place that encourages them to set it down during class. But, they have always stopped short of banning phones altogether. The technology policy they have created is usually something along the lines of “we will keep our phones in our bags, but it’s ok if we check them once in a while if it seems like something important or urgent.”
Once they have this policy document in place, my role is to help them to hold themselves accountable to whatever they agreed upon. Later during the semester, if I see a student using their phone for a length of time beyond a few seconds, I will pull them aside after class. I always first ask them if there’s an emergency of some kind. (I do this because, once, a student told me that they were live-translating for a relative in the hospital via text message, and of course I wouldn’t ever penalize someone in a situation like that!)
Assuming there’s no emergency, I remind the student that my role is to help students to hold themselves accountable for following the guidelines they set in place at the beginning of the semester. I don’t know what I’d do if a student continued to violate the guidelines after that, because honestly, one nudge is all it has ever taken for a student to get themselves back on track.
What do you think? Have you tried something similar? Leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments below. And, have a great semester!
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