Should students be allowed to use cellphones in class? That depends

In the classroom, teachers are up against an ever-growing hurdle in the smartphone era: commanding students’ attention as increasingly ubiquitous electronic devices carry a round-the-clock allure — just as they do for most adults.

Some educators embrace phones in class as a way to boost learning, allowing access to endless information and incorporating devices in school in a world that now relies on them. Others view phones as a distraction and show of disrespect, banning them with a vise-tight grip.

Should students be able to use their phones in class? Well, it depends on whom you ask.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contacted more than a dozen school districts throughout the region to invite educators to share their perspectives on the role of phones in class. The responses ranged from encouraging students to use them for assignments and other educational tasks to barring them altogether.

“Kids have changed so much in such a short amount of time,” said Todd Price, 11th-year principal of Montour High School in Robinson. “One of our biggest challenges as educators is always engaging them, making learning relevant to them. It’s a cellphone generation, a video game generation. They’re just constantly plugged in.”

Early in his career as an administrator, Mr. Price believed that students should keep their phones out of sight and would readily dole out detentions if they skirted the rule. But it created what he described as a “forbidden fruit phenomenon” and drove students to find ways to work around the restriction.

Today, technology abounds in the district — even hall passes are electronic — and it would feel, well, hypocritical if he were to keep with the more draconian approach, he said.

“We just really don’t make it more than it is,” Mr. Price said. “We have to realize and understand that they’re connected to

their phones all the time, and to ask them to totally unplug from that environment is a challenge. I’m just not sure what the return on that would be for an administrator to go on a witch hunt for their cellphones.”

Mr. Price encourages teachers at his school to make their own rules on whether to allow phones. Some set up charging stations where students may retrieve their phones when they please. Students from another district recently toured Montour High and watched in envy as their fellow teens operated in a cellphone safe zone, freer than the restrictions at their own school, Mr. Price said.

Brad Wilson, supervisor of customized and online learning for the Upper St. Clair School District, said access to technology seems to prevent most would-be problems involving cellphones. Every high school student there has a Chromebook, and the district’s internet server prohibits access to most social media websites, which generate the bulk of cellphone-related struggles anyway, he said.

“How do we keep the good things going but also prevent some of the other problems that schools face now?” he said.

But if it were up to Dave Sabina, a 19th-year Woodland Hills Jr./Sr. High School teacher, phones in his school would be done away with altogether. They have become a growing problem over the past five or six years, and the students with phones seem to be getting younger, he said.

From his standpoint, the problem is this: How are teachers supposed to rival the intoxicating glow of a smartphone?

“The phone is much more entertaining than I am,” he said. “It’s hard to compete with YouTube and their favorite rap video. Sometimes if you try to get them to give it up, that’s the most valuable thing they own, besides their shoes. They don’t want to give it up.”

Some younger students are banned from bringing phones to school, yet still manage to sneak them into the building, hiding them in their clothes, he said.

A possible solution recently dawned on Mr. Sabina in the form of a lockable pouch from a company called Yondr. The technology received national attention in recent years when comedian Dave Chappelle began requiring fans to lock up their phones during his stand-up routines.

Over the summer, Mr. Sabina informally pitched the technology to school board members — it would likely cost in the thousands of dollars to roll out at the high school — although it has not yet been adopted. “I wish the public would get behind us and maybe look at this honestly,” he said.

But Caitlin Dee, a substitute French teacher at Baldwin High School, employs a lower-tech approach to the same end. Borrowing a technique she observed last year while student teaching, she uses a storage pocket chart numbered one to 30, similar to a calculator holder, and awards points to students who give up their device for the period.

“I was tired of seeing kids on the phone when I’m trying to talk every single day,” she said. “It was too much to say, ‘Put the phone away,’ six times a day in a class that lasts 45 minutes.”

Ms. Dee, a 2013 Baldwin High graduate, tells her students that when she was in school, students weren’t allowed to have phones out at all, not even in the lunch line. She recently sent a note to students’ families informing them of her stance on devices in her class. Some bristled at the put-your-phoneaway incentive until they heard her reasoning, she said.

“I don’t want to be that teacher who takes away all the phones, but I want them to be responsible for their learning,” she said.

But elsewhere at Baldwin High, phones are part of class. Christopher Ross, a robotics teacher, instructs students to record video on their phones of their robots executing assigned tasks. “I prefer they don’t have them out when I’m teaching, but they can pretty much have them out any other time,” he said.

Teddy Gabrielson, a computer science teacher at Penn Hills High School, has students watch videos, share their work on social media and work with each other using their phones. A student who was absent recently used a phone to teleconference into class to participate in a group project, he said.

“Phones can be a distraction,” he wrote in an email. “But there is no difference between students having phones and students having tablets or laptops. We certainly wouldn’t want to limit computer use, so why do we want to limit cellphone use?”

Many Chartiers Valley High School teachers ask students to turn over their phones at the start of class unless the lesson that day calls for them, principal Patrick Myers wrote in an email. Some Pittsburgh public schools collect phones at the start of the day and return them at the end of the day, district spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said.

But what does the science say?

At Rutgers University, psychology professor Arnold Glass had long dreamed of how technology could make his classes more interactive and help his students learn. He became an early adopter. But about five years ago, students began to seem more distracted and exam scores lagged, he said.

“I started to investigate why I hit the plateau, and it became pretty obvious,” he said.

Mr. Glass led an experiment that included 118 Rutgers cognitive psychology students. Over the semester, he banned laptops, phones and tablets for students in one class and allowed them in the other section. The results confirmed his suspicion, he said.

The first-of-its-kind study, published in July, showed that students who divided their attention between devices and their instructor fared “significantly worse” on their final exams. And students who did not use devices in the section that allowed them fared worse, too, the study found.

“It was just like the effect of someone on their phone in the movie theater, except the ramifications are more than just being annoying,” Mr. Glass said.

He banned devices from his classes outright in what he described as an ethical obligation after establishing that they hurt their exam performance.

Plus, he said, “I would be a complete hypocrite if I didn’t.”