![]() ![]() I am aware that there are drawbacks to an outright ban, not the least of which is that it removes structured, supervised opportunities for teenagers to learn how to develop healthy relationships with their phones. Instead, state policy would do the work of telling students and parents, “No.” This would take the onus off teachers and administrators to enforce individualized prohibitions. ![]() If students need to bring a phone to school, they can check it in with the front office before first period (phone lockers are a thing). The best way to initiate this shift would be for the California Department of Education to issue policy guidance stating that phones should not be accessible to students during the academic school day - in other words, ban phones from classrooms. Instead of placing the burden on individual teachers, we need to shift the culture of schools to the point where having a smartphone in a classroom would be akin to smoking in one it just wouldn’t happen. And yet individual teachers are somehow supposed to prevent teenagers from using these devices? It’s absurd. All these factors implicitly encourage students to bring their phones with them to school. Consider, for a moment, all the actions and decisions that lead the average student to show up to class with a phone in their pocket: the billions invested in software and hardware development the research devoted to figuring out how to keep users engaged the choice by individual parents to allow their child to have a phone. What’s been bothering me lately is that everyone knows this, yet as a society, we willingly allow - or more accurately, encourage - high school students to bring what are perhaps the greatest tools of distraction ever created onto school campuses every single day. Smartphones and social media apps are designed to capture users’ attention. Second, and more important, teachers should not have to police smartphone usage in the first place. This kind of power struggle creates more problems than it solves. I’ve had students storm out of my room and even cuss me out when I’ve demanded they hand over their phones. In my own time as a teacher, almost all the serious conflicts I’ve had with students have been over phones. ![]() Like the rest of us, students are intensely attached to their phones even if you successfully confiscate their phones, you risk damaging your relationship with them. One might reasonably object: Why not just enforce no usage policies as stringently as my colleagues and I did? That’s not a solution for two reasons.įirst, policing phone use leads to power struggles that harm teacher-student relationships. You cannot pay attention to anything else when you are looking at your phone. A number of high schools have done exactly that - and who can blame them? Smartphones stand in direct conflict with the mission of educational spaces. They’re so problematic that I believe it is time to ban them from school altogether. I share this story, however, not as a scale-up solution, but to illustrate just how problematic phones are in schools today. Within days of rolling out the new policy, phone use in our classes effectively evaporated. We kept track of student infractions across our classes and referred any student who had their phone confiscated more than once to the administration for follow-up. We warned students at the start of every class, and after that, we confiscated any phone we saw during the period. Trying to solve the problem, we collectively enacted a zero-tolerance smartphone policy at the start of spring semester. But it was happening many, many times within a single class period, and the resulting distraction was decimating students’ ability to focus on academic tasks. Instead, it was a more under-the-radar sort of usage: checking their phones in repeated bursts - to fire off a quick text or read a notification or, in some cases, watch a quick TikTok. The problem was not that students were scrolling through social media feeds or openly playing Clash Royale. ![]() Last fall, my grade-level colleagues and I faced a problem: Smartphone usage in our classrooms was rampant, and we struggled to rein it in.
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