I used to be against these bans, but not anymore
Cell phone bans in K-12 schools have been in the news at the start of this school year. Several states have instituted measures to ban cell phones in elementary and secondary schools, and bans are happening in prestigious private schools as well. The research suggests these policies help students to pay attention in class and also to socialize and interact with their peers in real time. Interestingly enough, a lot of the objections to these policies are coming from parents who are used to being in contact with their children at all times.
For what its worth, I think this bad behavior with cell phones is fading, at least at the college level. A lot of my students have heard about and thought about cell phone addiction and the problems of various social media platforms, so I do think that there is a lot more awareness of the problem of staring at the phone too much. I think we’re soon returning to before Covid times with cell phones— and lots of other things, too.
It’s a good idea, though I didn’t used to think so.
When cell phones first showed up 25-20 years ago, I didn’t think much about a policy in my classes because there wasn’t much you could do with those flip phones besides talk to someone, and students knew they couldn’t do that. The main issue back then was students would forget to silence their phone and they’d go off in the middle of class. I’m not proud to admit this, but if a student’s cell phone rang during a discussion, I would make them sing a song for the group. I had heard this was the common practice in Norway and Sweden; the goal was to have a slightly embarrassing but also funny way of reminding students to turn off their phones. There’s no way I would do anything like this nowadays, of course— though it did work pretty well back then.
When smartphones came along, I continued my kind of non-policy policy: don’t let it be a distraction, and if you need to use it for taking notes or looking something up, feel free. A lot college instructors instituted strict bans on both phones and laptops, but these policies always struck me as reactionary and unnecessary. I didn’t want to be that sage on the stage who insists on complete attention from every student for every minute of class. And I didn’t want to be a hypocrite either. In faculty meetings, especially the larger ones, most of my colleagues have their laptops open and they are clearly multitasking. That’s what I do. Anyway, I always had a few students who could not resist the distraction and fondled their devices constantly, but I usually let it go, figuring that these students were mostly hurting themselves and that the overall benefits of these devices outweighed the harms.
In fact, as I blogged about back in June and September 2019, I was on a research release in the fall 2019 semester to work on a project officially called “Investigating Classroom Technology Bans Through the Lens of Writing Studies,” but which I more informally called the “Classroom Tech Bans Are Bullshit” project. I was studying the quantitative/experimental research that had been done about students using laptops and devices in classrooms, most of which was done by folks in education and/or psychology, to try to connect it to the practices and qualitative/observational sorts of research on this in writing studies. I gave a talk about starting this project at the Corridors 2019 conference at Oakland University (and I repurposed this for the online version of the CCCCs in 2020) called “Laptop/Cell Phone Bans are Bullshit (or Maybe Not).” The very short version for now is a lot of the scholarship argued it was better for students to take notes by hand rather than with a device, and that (IMO) was and is bullshit. But the “Maybe Not” part of the talk was about the problems of multitasking, how devices themselves are distracting to others, and the ways in which social media applications are designed to be as addictive as slot machines.
The next semester was the start of Covid. I and almost all my EMU colleagues taught online from the middle of that Winter 2020 semester through Winter 2022, and most high schools in Michigan were all online for those two years as well. That time online changed everyone in higher ed, but especially the students. I blogged about this in more detail here at the end of the 2022-23 school year and after being back to teaching f2f. In brief, two years of online courses was enough for a lot of students to forget they couldn’t behave the same way in person and in a classroom as they did when they were online and alone at home and often still in bed. After all, if you’re a student in a Zoom class with the camera off or in an asynchronous online class, no one cares if you’re texting or watching cat videos as the same time as you’re doing online class stuff. The freshmen had more problems with distraction then the juniors and seniors, but even some of the better students in the upper-division classes could not stop staring at their phone right in the middle of discussions.
In other words, I went from a few students not paying attention to most of them not paying attention. This was obviously bad for students, but it was also bad for me. Like I said, I don’t need to be the at the center when I’m teaching. But when a lot of students are ignoring everything and everyone around them, including me, it’s hard to not take that personally. And at the end of the day, my students’ behavior was just rude.
So in Fall 2023, I started doing something I never thought I’d do: I began class by asking students to place their cell phones on a table in the front of the room. Their phones are in sight, but out of reach. I’ve had a few students resist this by giving some reason (kids, ill relatives, etc.) why they must be in contact at all times. I tell them to leave their phones on, and if it rings, take the call in the hall. (No one has had to take a call). Also worth mentioning: I explain why I do all this by sharing a version of what I just wrote here, including the reality that learning how to participate in a f2f conversation with other humans without staring at your cell phone is a good adulting skill to have.
The class discussions improved immediately. Sure, some students grumbled about it, but no one complained on the end of the semester course evaluations where students tend to complain about all sorts of things. Now, I only do this for the first three weeks or so of the semester. After they get the idea, I tell them they can keep their phones— as long as they remain face down on the desk or otherwise stowed away. There is often a backsliding moment where I once again collect their phones, but that too is a teachable moment.
This semester when I first asked students to put their phones on the table in the front of the room, none of them hesitated or seemed surprised. I suspect I was not the first teacher they have had since Covid with a similar policy. The other day was the first class meeting in my more advanced class where I told students they could keep their phones, and one student went ahead and put their phone on the table I had previously set up anyway. “I think this helps,” she said.
For what its worth, I think this bad behavior with cell phones is fading, at least at the college level. A lot of my students have heard about and thought about cell phone addiction and the problems of various social media platforms, so I do think that there is a lot more awareness of the problem of staring at the phone too much. I think we’re soon returning to before Covid times with cell phones— and lots of other things, too.