In May of this year, we published Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair’s “Rethinking Phone Policies: Empowering Students, Uniting Educators, and Cultivating Focus in the Classroom.” Now we’re excited to share with you Part Two of that piece.
As we prepare for the school year ahead, let us all continue to find the courage to lead. At the gcLi we believe there is an urgent need to prepare young people to become capable citizens and agents of change in the world; we believe teachers are the best people to prepare students for this work; and to do this work, teachers need tools, resources, and professional networks.
Onward, together,
Emily Tymus Ihrke
Editor, gcLi
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Part Two: Rethinking Phone Policies: Empowering Students, Uniting Educators, and Cultivating Focus in the Classroom
by Catherine Steiner-Adair, Ed.D, Institute Scholar, gcLi
Here are my summary thoughts about how smartphones in schools today compromise academic engagement, interpersonal relationships, and self-regulation necessary for learning. It’s noteworthy to add that all of this also applies to smartwatches in school and the need to require that texting and notifications are turned off during the school day on all laptops.
Faculty:
- Teachers hate being the tech police, and there is often poor teacher enforcement of rules and expectations. Unevenly enforced rules create ill will amongst faculty, give the wrong message to students about being part of their school community, and undermine school culture. The strain placed on educators is palpable, as they work hard to create group cohesion and participation, to help each student take positive risks and understand themselves as learners and peers.
- It is demoralizing to look out into a classroom and know kids are on their phones! Teachers report constantly having to choose between calling a student out versus staying connected to the class momentum and teaching those who are present. Teacher retention is a rising concern, and today’s teachers are frustrated and demoralized from having to spend time interrupting lesson plans, calling out students, and having to take phones away. Teachable moments about phone violations are tedious, unfulfilling, and undermine student-teacher relationships.
Administrators, Deans, and Advisors:
- Many of the time-consuming and sometimes litigious issues that Division Heads, Deans, and Advisors encounter with students and parents are the result of interactions on phones during the school day (as well as after hours).
- School leaders are exhausted from parent emails and complaints about the school phone policy and the ways in which phones impact their children’s academic and social engagement during the school day.
- School leaders are aware that not all teachers enforce school policy, and it’s a difficult dance trying to get all school staff, students, and parents on board. Like teachers, they also hate being the tech police with faculty and students. Administrators report that their efforts to support student wellbeing, engagement, and fun are undermined by the problems that arise due to the presence of phones.
School Counselors:
- School counselors and psychologists tell me that many if not most issues they are called upon to deal with involve social media in some way or other. School counselors are overwhelmed by the current mental health needs of students, and their already packed days are often interrupted by an upset student who just encountered a disturbing online post. Given the correlations between social media and anxiety, depression, perfectionism, social avoidance, self-harm, bullying, exposure to hate, porn, deep fakes, etc, (i.e.: the teenage mental health crisis), they struggle to fathom why their schools allow students to access phones during the school day.
Students’ Mental Health and Wellbeing:
- The irresistible siren call of the screen can lead to minor or major meltdowns and impact a student’s emotional stability and mental health at any moment when the student “just checks” their phone. When kids are texting during class, they can quickly become emotionally dysregulated, preoccupied, and anxious about the text thread or video, and tune out from class and tune into psychological distress.
- Adolescents are extremely vulnerable to social comparison, self-consciousness, and insecurity. Their sense of self is fluid, often inconsistent, and permeable. The pervasive use of phones among students has been correlated with heightened levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Counselors report correlations between students checking their phones during the school day and an increase in perfectionism, social avoidance, isolation, disordered eating, body dysmorphia, self-injury, emotional outbursts, impulsivity, and physical violence.
Students’ Focus and Attention:
- Smartphones are powerful stimulants to the still-developing student brain. The mere presence of a phone, not to mention multi-tasking under a desk, will dysregulate students’ brains, and disrupt attention spans and cognitive engagement. Notifications, alerts, and social media updates hijack students’ neural circuits, impair their ability to focus, retain information, and engage effectively in learning activities. Students who are on phones throughout the school days are deprived of developing healthy brains with the capacity for deep engagement, self-regulation, impulse control, and executive function.
- Students know it and feel trapped. Many students are concerned about the impact of phones in the classroom on their educational experiences. They acknowledge that phones are distracting or anxiety producing, and most students admit that they lack the self-regulation to resist the attention-grabbing stimulation of a phone within reach. Many kids have said that they wish the school leaders would take a clear stand, ban phones, and make it easier for them to be present.
- The allure and addictive nature of constant connectivity poses a significant threat to students’ ability to concentrate, absorb information, and participate actively in the learning process. A recent study found that 42% of 13–17-year-old students text during school. 80% of students say they don’t think it’s wrong to text during the day. Students (and adults) look at texts for about 19 seconds- and then take an average of 23 minutes and 17 seconds to refocus and get back on task after reading a text. Class over!
- Kids are taking unhealthy risks in class. When students are multitasking on their phones, it negatively affects learning and task completion and, more generally, research has shown that cell phones distract and negatively impact reaction times, performance, grades, enjoyment of lesson tasks, and cognitive capacity.
- When students talk in the hallways during passing time about their previous class, or reflect on the class silently, it reinforces short- and long-term memory of the content just covered. Texting in passing time, going on social media or checking a game, deletes this valuable extension of learning as well as the social benefit of talking to a peer.
Students and School Culture:
- Students complain widely and wildly about everyone being on their phones all the time and the lack of relating IRL and the impact that has on school spirit and culture.
- Students describe their school days as experiences of toggling between engagement in learning and their school community, and being interrupted by digital distraction, discord, and social disconnection. They talk about how what goes on or down online becomes more important in the moment than what is happening in their classrooms. Students emote about the jarring impact on their mental health of seeing cyberbullying, harassment, and online toxicity, and how hard it is to stay positively and actively engaged. They reveal how easily they become anxious about their identity and their sense of belonging.
- Students are confused or don’t care about the school rules that are unevenly enforced. Unevenly reinforced school rules of any kind undermine school culture. Eighty percent of students who text during class, some continuously, say they don’t get in trouble. It follows then that about 64% of students don’t think it’s wrong to text during the day at school. And let’s not forget that when we see someone else texting, the urge to also text emerges quickly, as texting is contagious.
Students and Parents:
- Sixty six percent of students say their parents text them even though they know their kids are in class. Kids are in a double bind when parents text them- either their parents will be mad if they don’t respond or if they do and get caught, their teacher will be mad. Parents don’t understand that the absence of their tone of voice can turn a parent’s intended supportive text into a student receiving an academic pressure text (ex: How’d the big test go?).
- Parents don’t understand that by texting with their kids throughout the day, they are undermining the development of independence, autonomy, and self-advocacy skills. Research on adolescent resilience highlights the importance of students having trustworthy relationships with appropriate adults in addition to parents and guardians. When parents are endlessly available 24/7 to their children throughout the school day, they undermine their child’s ability to learn the skill of building essential relationships with trustworthy adults at school.
- On the parent side, receiving an upset text from a child can hijack their entire day, and have them worrying and jumping to conclusions, over-functioning and trying to solve the problem, without knowing the full story or that the perceived crisis has passed.
- When I address parents, I often get the question “What about safety? What if there’s a school shooting?” Should there be a school shooting, you want your kids listening to teachers, not texting their parents. The far more likely risks to students’ safety are psychological and social. Students report feeling unsafe at school when they pick up their phone and see cyber bullying, hate, porn, videos etc., that are mean, humiliating and frightening. Mental health and wellbeing are safety issues, and smartphones put students at risk on a daily basis.
Students’ Social and Emotional Learning and Sense of Belonging:
- Students are on screens in quads, cafeterias, and hallways, not to mention classes- all the spaces where students develop SEL skills. Students complain about anxiety from FOMO if they aren’t checking their phones, and peer pressure to be texting and connecting online throughout the day. And at the same time, they say they are disappointed by the lack of time spent talking with friends without interruptions and lack of experience/opportunities to make new friends.
- While many kids report that their phone helps them connect to friends outside the schoolhouse, they also report feeling lonelier and more isolated during the school day when their peers are head-down texting or on social media. They laugh wistfully about feeling insecure with peers and teachers about face-to-face connections, giving and receiving feedback, or talking to a teacher in a class where they are struggling. They wonder about their social skills when it comes to talking to strangers, having deep conversations, solving conflicts, standing up for a friend, or if they can tell the truth about who they are.
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Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair is an internationally recognized clinical psychologist, school consultant, speaker, and author. She is the author of the award-winning book The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age (a WSJ Top 10 Best Nonfiction Book of the Year).
Her work converges on one fundamental mission:
Ensuring that today’s students – our children – have not just the technological tools they need as they inherit the AI future, but the tools of our humanity – the empathy, ethics, social and emotional intelligence and DEI competencies they need to survive and thrive in our ever-changing interconnected world.
Catherine speaks at schools and conferences worldwide, working with students of all ages, and educators, and is a frequent resource to the media. She recently stepped down from 30+ years as a Clinical Instructor and Research Associate Psychologist at Harvard Medical School. She has a private practice which is currently occurring online.