A call to action about phones in our schools
Next school year, your students may find themselves harder to reach during the school day. That may come as an unwanted surprise, but here’s why you and your students should embrace the likely changes this fall in Connecticut classrooms about student use of smartphones.
Last month, Gov. Ned Lamont’s office filed a bill calling for such a policy that would “consider the various needs of students, such as age and grade level, and include appropriate enforcement provisions.” Though Governor Lamont has suggested that smartphones should not be permitted in “the elementary school classroom,” a nuanced consideration regarding differences in needs and maturity of students across grade levels is an important factor in policies around smartphone usage in K-12 schools.
Nearly all schools have policies forbidding certain items. Illegal and dangerous items of course, but schools also prohibit items including toys, gum, candy, game cards, spicy chips, and even plastic water bottles (see 2016 Senior Talent Show Water Bottle Flip from North Carolina). Many items are not allowed because of their tendency to disrupt focus and distract students and teachers from their main goal in the classroom: engaging in teaching and learning.
Limiting smartphones in schools is not unreasonable. Despite serving an increasing variety of important functions in daily life, smartphones are incredibly distracting. This is equally true for students as for the person checking sports scores at the dinner table, reading an email at the (no-longer) red light, or receiving a call in the movie theater.
Distractions in schools already present challenges for teaching and learning. In their 2021 publication, The Big Problem With Little Interruptions to Classroom Learning, researchers Matthew A. Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum examined the effects of classroom disruptions at 41 schools. They found classroom disruptions are associated with lower math and English Language Arts scores, and the study only examined school-related disruptions (intercom announcements, calls to the classroom, tardy students, etc.) and did not include disruptions due to smartphones in their analysis.
Even so, the authors reported an average 71 seconds of lost time per disruption. By these numbers, if smartphones were permitted in classrooms and each student in a room of 20 students received one disruptive notification per day, that class would lose 24 minutes to smartphone disruptions daily. That’s almost 10 school days. Considering how often we feel a buzz in our pocket, or hear a tone, accounting for every notification students receive would be mind-boggling on time lost.
Not to mention, the negative effects of smartphones in classrooms are not limited to impacts on attention and focus. Smartphones are often expensive and carrying one is a big responsibility, especially for younger children. Smartphones can easily be broken, lost, or stolen and in school they can become tools for cheating or bullying.
Most parents or guardians arguing for students to have devices readily available want to be in contact with their student in case of emergency. And yet the teacher (or office) would still need to contact the parent or guardian directly to confirm any next steps. For younger students especially, such situations would be better handled by the parent or guardian contacting the office, minimizing both disruption to the class and, depending on the emergency, potential distress to classmates.
No one ever wants to ponder a non-drill lockdown situation — one of the scariest scenarios imaginable and yet frequently cited for why smartphone access should never be hindered. It’s understandable that parents would want some measure of control and assurance if that ever happens. However, in such a terrible situation, it is imperative that students remain attentive to instructions from teachers and staff and smartphones are sure to interfere when time is of the essence.
On a practical level, when smartphones are allowed in schools, additional questions arise for which guidelines and policies must be created that take into account the age, maturity, and needs of the students. At the same time, any “appropriate enforcement of provisions” developed will hopefully also propose strategies that can largely avoid turning our hardworking K-12 educators into ‘smartphone police’.
Regardless of grade-level, the creation and implementation of thoughtfully developed policies that limit, or even prohibit, smartphones in classrooms will support environments and habits conducive to learning. Whether left at home, stored in a backpack, or placed in a classroom box, smartphones should be mostly unavailable to older students, and unavailable to younger students. The school environment must reinforce focusing on learning, engaging with teachers and peers, and building classroom community.