EDUCATION: BRING ON THE GREAT DISCONNECT
Left to their own electronic devices, students would do nothing but stare at them. One professor took a radical step to win back the classroom.
Left to their own electronic devices, students would do nothing but stare at them. One professor took a radical step to win back the classroom.
Several years ago, all the teaching skills I had honed over two decades in the university classroom stopped working. Something was siphoning the curiosity and intelligence out of the lecture hall, leaving only recycled air and the buzz of fluorescent lighting to accompany my voice. I blamed the glowing electronic devices that held a lock on my students’ eyeballs. So I banned them: No smartphones. No iPods or iPads. No laptops even.
All of this sounds a tad more assertive than I felt. The truth of it was, I laid out my new policy feeling more than a bit defensive. And I wasn’t reassured by the skeptical reaction of my colleagues, who mostly said things like “Let me know how that goes.” Like many professors who are not exactly freshly pressed, I was vulnerable to the niggling fear that I’d failed to evolve. So even though I have a background in psychology and knew there was a sound, scientific basis to my no-devices policy, I still hesitated to tell my students they had to stash their gadgets.
What clinched my decision was hearing about the work life of my younger sister at a well-known high-tech company. Much of her day was spent in long, joyless meetings in which she and her colleagues popped on and off their various devices, dipping in and out of the conversation, while e-mailing, tweeting, conducting market research, or preparing PowerPoint slides for the next meeting. Needless to say, all this productivity led to fairly unproductive meetings. Key issues often went unresolved, and the decisions that were made were usually so poorly thought out that they had to be revisited and revised. All of which created a need for more meetings.
In many of my own classes and research meetings, people talked over each other excitedly, muttering together over a sticky problem, finding the snarls in each other’s ideas, sometimes emerging sweating and victorious with a promising solution, and often left the room vibrating with new ideas. I wanted to make sure that before my students slid out into the “real” world, they had the opportunity to know what it felt like to have a strenuous and passionate intellectual exchange. And for that to be possible, the devices had to go.
We take it for granted that being constantly tethered to our devices is a fact of life these days. But that’s not actually true. There are many spaces where most of us wouldn’t dream of pulling out our smartphones and where it would seem utterly reasonable to ban them: at a play, during hockey practice, at a funeral, while making love, while performing or listening to a concert. What is it that exempts these spaces? Why is it that when my teenage son shows up at climbing practice, no one has to nag him and his teammates to stash their phones away, and no one questions the coach’s wisdom in insisting that they do so?
The answers may seem obvious. For example, you can’t exert yourself physically while performing a Google search, but you can attend a meeting or listen to a lecture while doing some multi-tasking. Sort of. More accurately, you can appear to take part in a meeting or a lecture. The thing is, most of us have very flawed theories about the inner workings of our own minds, so we don’t realize that just marinating in information is not enough to internalize it.
Minds work more like bodies than we realize. Just as we have to actually manipulate our bodies to acquire new physical skills, we also have to
do things with information in order for it to leave a meaningful imprint in our minds. Without working up a mental sweat by questioning or engaging with information, any of it that we do take in is insubstantial, wispy as water vapour on a sunny day.
But there’s something more that sets apart those spaces into which we willingly enter device-free. We put aside our cellphones because we expect
Our phones send a clear signal that we don’t expect to be inspired or moved.
that something deeper will happen there than the mere downloading of information from one mind to another. We also expect to be transported, to be inspired, to be moved, to connect profoundly with other human beings, maybe even to experience a state of ecstasy. When we pull out our phones, we send a clear signal that we don’t expect any of these things to happen. That’s a pretty realistic expectation if you’re standing in line at the grocery store or making your bleary-eyed way in to work on the CTrain. But if you glance at your phone in the middle of a romantic encounter, no matter how inspiring a lover you’re with, that person is unlikely to pull out the stops for you.
Professors are no different than lovers: project low expectations onto us and we shrivel into them. The same is true for students, bosses and co-workers. By not limiting the use of devices in the classroom or at work, we all agree to keep the bar low.
But shouldn’t we expect more? Shouldn’t we at least sometimes expect that staff meetings will inspire and connect the people who work together? And why shouldn’t lectures enrapture students as well as inform them? Banning devices doesn’t guarantee that we’ll approach the transcendent, but it opens the door to the possibility.
When my students put away their electronic tools the efffects were extraordinary. They began to ask questions, sophisticated and thoughtful questions. They clustered after class to keep discussions going until the incoming instructor nudged us out. It became rare to see heads nodding with sleep. The quality of papers improved dramatically. And best of all, most of us seemed to be having fun.
My own experience is probably not an outlier; several studies have shown that students who use laptops in class perform worse and are less satisfied with their educations, and a recent study led by Faria Sana of McMaster University found that multi-tasking on laptops during a lecture interfered with students’ ability to remember the material, even for students who weren’t using the laptops themselves. Like second-hand smoke, the effects of electronic distraction can permeate the room.
I’ve kept up my device-free policy, but it is getting increasingly difficult to keep everybody off their devices. Each semester, a few more students at the edges of the classroom can’t help stealing furtive glances under their desks. If it ever becomes impossible for students to buy into the device-free zone, classroom teaching may truly have become obsolete—not because all the functions of the classroom have been replaced by other means, but because we’ve lost sight of the irreplaceable things the classroom alone has to offer. The same goes for in-person interactions at work or play.
If that day comes, many instructors will slink off into virtual teaching. Me, I may have to take up coaching basketball.