About What Happened When the Education Scientist Gave up Her Phone for a Day, and Other Interesting Research.

How can I use coaching strategies to cultivate a system where students take ownership of their technology use and work toward self-regulation? This Spanish teacher from Alexandria hasn’t given up on this impossible dream. With the help of the fabulous Set Lab consultant, Allison Furton, I read up on the research and conducted an informal and horrifying experiment.

Much of what the research and literature say wasn’t a surprise. Technology has benefits but is also a distraction. Multitasking does not improve productivity. Cell phones are the biggest technology distraction. However, other research informed my project and moved the study forward. Now that ADHD is seen as a disorder of executive function rather than simply a behavioral issue that can be solved with medication, more interventions focus on helping individuals increase self-management skills. Executive function coaching is one of these methods. It uses an inquiry-based approach where a trained coach models successful executive functioning and asks the student a series of curious, open-ended questions that guide students through the process of making a plan to meet their goal. Although there is not much research on coaching with high school students, studies indicate that it is beneficial to college students, particularly with improving goal attainment and fostering self-regulation.

In an article about the distraction of technology in the learning environment, Audrey Griffin writes about this struggle (Griffin 2014). She points out that often teachers and professors don’t model appropriate technology use, particularly with cell phones in class and in meetings. She challenged her class to go half a day without any information technology and write about it. This got me thinking about my cell phone habits and what etiquette I model in my classes. One night, Allison and I decided that we would replicate Dr. Griffin’s assignment the next day at school, but just with our cell phones. We wanted to see if we could do it and we also wanted to understand what this might feel like for our students who are required to turn off phones and check them in upon entering the building. The next morning, we bravely turned in our phones at the front desk. It was terrifying.

What surprised me the most was the amount of my cognitive load that was occupied by the absent phone and what I might be missing out on throughout the day. I invented reasons to walk by the front desk and not ask about my phone. Then, I started wondering if Allison had left her phone, but I couldn’t text her to find out. There are some work related tasks that I missed being able to use my phone for, like setting the timer app at the start of each class for the warm-up. There were several times throughout the day when I reached for the phone and then remembered it wasn’t available. Allison was supposed to check her phone for 4 hours but gave up after the first 2. I left my phone for the entire school day. We both took away insight into how much of a role those phones play in our lives and what it must feel like for our students to give them up on a regular basis during the school day. We are adults with fully formed frontal lobes and strong executive function skills yet here we were acting childish about our cell phones.

My students’ phones are out of sight, but not out of mind, and they struggle to use their laptops productively throughout the day. It’s not as simple as taking the laptops away because many of my students need their laptops to access their accommodations and use assistive technology. These students who need those laptops to succeed also have a deficit in their ability to self-monitor their use of said device. At university, it is not uncommon for professors or departments to put a clause in the syllabus about using personal technology in class, so it’s clear that the expectation at the college level is that students already know how to exhibit “professional” behavior with respect to the laptop. If students are expected to demonstrate self-regulation with technology independently in college, that means we need to start practicing that in high school.

In the next few weeks, I will be setting up my experiment to see how I can use coaching questions to help students keep themselves on track with their in-class technology use. Will it work or am I chasing windmills? You’ll have to keep reading to find out. Follow me on Twitter or read my blog on Medium.

Works Cited

McCoy, Bernard R., “Digital Distractions in the Classroom Phase II: Student Classroom Use of Digital Devices for Non-Class Related Purposes” (2016). Faculty Publications, College of

Journalism & Mass Communications. 90. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/journalismfacpub/90.

Parker, D.R. & Field, Sharon & Sawilowsky, Shlomo & Rolands, Laura. (2011). An examination of the effects of ADHD coaching on university students’ executive functioning. Journal ofPostsecondary Education and Disability. 24. 115–132.

Griffin, Audrey. Technology, Distraction and the Learning Environment. Chowin University.(2014), pp. 1–6. http://saisconferencemgmt.org/proceedings/2014/Griffin.pdf

F. Sana, T. Weston, N.J. CepedaLaptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62 (2013), pp. 24–31. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563218304205#bbib57