Winning the Phone Battle
or at least calling a cease-fire?
Does trying to hold your students’ attention against the onslaught of dings, buzzes, and alerts constantly streaming from their phones have you feeling sort of like…
If so, your frustration is undoubtedly caused by the incongruence between what you believe your kids “should” do with phones in the classroom (nothing?) as opposed to what they actually do (darn near literally everything). If so, I suggest that you stop looking at your cell phone policy as an intractable line in the sand that cannot be moved and instead look at it more in the same way you would, say, a given lesson plan that’s fallen completely flat. What’s not working, and what are your options for fixing it?
First of all, let’s get one thing out of the way…
Kid’s Shouldn’t Use Their Phones in Class.
That’s pretty much undeniably true. So what are your options?
Option 1: Make a rule against phones, admonish students when they violate it, and escalate the consequences for continued violations.
For the next step in this plan, scroll up and look at that picture of the doughboy banging his head off the wall again. But this is a reasonable rule, and students should follow rules. True, and to quote the smartest thing a Dallas Cowboys (🤢)player ever said, “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas.” — Dan Meredith. Look, telling kids they can’t use their phones is like telling me I can’t eat bacon. When you’re not looking, I’m going to eat the bacon. Punish me and I’ll get mad at you, put the bacon away for now and then eat it again later. Why? Because now you’re the guy or girl KEEPING ME FROM MY BACON! Tomorrow, I’m going to eat more bacon. The administration is also powerless against my bacon lust. The only time I don’t eat bacon is when I don’t have bacon. Which brings me to…
Option 2: Use a phone holder to have students store their phones for the class period.
This strategy works because it gets the students’ phones out of their possession. The further away and more out-of-sight the phones can be, the better. Research shows us that getting phones out of students’ hands is by far and away the most effective way to mitigate their distracting effects. Rules against use? A near complete waste of time and effort, as a Pew Research Center study showed that nearly 60% of students in schools that ban phones entirely still regularly use them in class! Perhaps more surprisingly, the research also shows us that merely possessing phones in class, even when they are not used at all, diminishes students’ ability to learn because they’re still worried about them. This angst actually uses up some of students’ working memories to a statistically significant extent. Letting the kids in on the research and pointing out the distracting nature of their phones as this teacher did might also help the cause. If you get nothing else from this paragraph, know this: having students silence their phones and put them right in front of them on their desk for the period is a lousy idea contradicted by science.
What if they won’t give up their phones or claim they don’t have them? Won’t the storage policy cause the same sorts of interminable conflict as a “no phone” policy? It may for some, and if you find it does for you, that is where tech can help you battle tech!
Option 3: PocketPoints
Pocket Points is a mobile app that allows you to track your students’ use of cell phones during your class and reward them for staying on task. Set up is simple; you create and establish the time period for your class at https://pocketpoints.com/teachers, identify a number of tiered rewards your students can earn for keeping their phones away and off in class and invite students to sign up. Students then download the app and join your class via a code system. Rewards could include extra credit, homework credit, treats or any other creative idea you might come up with, and they are based on total time in compliance with your phone policy. Students can even earn additional awards in the form of discounts offered by local businesses! The idea is to turn the whole punitive model on its head and hopefully (eventually) prove to students that keeping their phones away will pay off in better achievement. It really could change the entire tenor of the phone issue in your classroom. Shout out to @FigsClass for turning me on to this one!
I try not to make my posts just a sales pitch for a certain product, but pocket points really does have the right idea in terms of a positive approach to the phone problem. So, if option one isn’t working for you (and it very likely isn’t, even if cell phones don’t seem to be a huge problem in your classroom) why not try a combination of options two and three? If it doesn’t result in a significant reduction of cell phone use in your room, you can always go back to banging your head off the wall!
That’s all for today. Hit me up if you’ve got questions!
