Great work, PFSM!!! Between this and Screen Strong's "Kids' Brains and Screens" course we have a great opportunity to tackle Haidt's 4th (and most important) action step: returning to a play-based childhood.
Very kind of you to include the printable graphics. This is an important public health crisis and it is gaining great attention and traction. Keep pushing forward. The public needs leadership on this issue, consensus is growing and change will come. I hope to see further research and discussion about WHY tech is used within classrooms and if it actually benefits learning or is, indeed as most of us suspect, actually a historical anomaly that hasn’t enhanced learning. Tech skills might be needed as say, a preparation for the job market, but could the tech learning be confined to a tech lab within the school and accessed only during formal training sessions much as keyboarding (typing) and other skills classes?
I agree! When tech was introduced into classrooms, there was no questioning about whether it supported learning. There is some research that reveals reading comprehension is better when reading on paper and math skills improve on paper as well. Removing phones from classrooms is a huge first step. Hopefully, a movement towards minimizing tech in classrooms will be next! Check out my article I wrote on Public https://www.public.news/p/big-tech-hubris-and-greed-behind
personally, I prefer a faraday-pouch model for student cell phones, with a simple rule: While inside the designated buildings, the phones must be in the pouch.
If you need to make a call, you step outside the building. Phones during lunch or inside the building but after school hours may or may not be permitted. Each school must make a choice on that.
and in the event of a true emergency, the students can always open the pouch anyway.
Repeat offenders who can't exercise personal discipline in this matter may have harsher systems imposed on them.
Hard agree that there needs to be an aspect to the policy that builds student discipline and impulse control to use as foundational basis for trust. Depriving kids of the opportunity to cultivate self-control does not seem like it will set them up to be able to successfully regulate themselves outside of school.
Well, that too, but mostly I just don't trust the average school staff with total control over a student's lines of communication. I've heard enough stories about teachers or principles making complete fools of themselves, where students were entirely justified in going around them to communicate with parents on short notice.
Also, I'm still holding a grudge over the one time I stepped into an empty hallway during lunch, made a call to my parents to inform them I'd be staying late for some club activity and would need a revised pickup time, and then got a detention for it because a hall monitor saw me do it.
And that was pre-smart-phone. Schools used to have payphones for a reason, before cell phones came along. (If I remember correctly, I was LITERALLY standing right next to the pay-phone while making a cell-phone call. like I said, I'm still holding a grudge.)
That would mostly solve itself if you students were trusted to appropriately use their phones, no? The concern about giving school administrators additional power is definitely valid given the strained relationship between parents and educators. Additional measures like California freeing schools from informing parents of the student's gender identity/sexual orientation helping restore that trust either. However, I do think it is more probable than not an overall net benefit to give educators additional power to reduce classroom distractions, especially given the appalling student test scores.
I suppose the death of the hall monitor is about one of the few things you would envy about being a student today.
As a teacher, I'd have no problem with folks who say that we need to teach kids how to appropriately use technology (phones) in schools if said kids came to us with a modicum of being able to use the technology appropriately.
Also - there is the whole thing that phones and their apps are ruthlessly designed to exploit 200K+ years of evolution, which explains why, at a meeting about monitoring/limiting cell phone use at my school, 75% of the teachers are staring at their phones.
It definitely requires buy-in from all parties: students, parents, and educators, all of whom have definitely been dropping the ball on this issue. Playing hot potato with accountability isn't going to help anything. Indeed educators should not be expected to ensure students have good digital hygiene, but when parents are uninterested in helping their kids and the kids are unable to self-correct, should someone else step in to try and fix the situation?
Hall monitors rarely exist. Sometimes, a teacher may be in the hall during a class or during their planning, but I haven't seen/heard of a designated hall monitor in my 16 years of teaching.
In my school district, there was usually 1 teacher assigned to patrol just outside the main cafeteria, where students were most likely to be wandering free once they finished eating.
This seems a really great plan, well thought out, and per survey the support among teachers for phone bans is greater than I thought.
The one problematic factor is the question of school emergencies. Instinctively parents are going to desire that their kids can contact them during a genuine emergency. The reasons given by "experts" to mitigate this worry came across as pretty thin. Not saying that to be a critic, I support the plan, but that part is not as strong as the rest.
On that topic let me float my suggestion for improving school safety. Recruit a corps of volunteer (or paid?) safety officers, probably ex-military . Vet them like crazy to weed out the unstable. They must maintain membership in a national organization and (sadly but truthfully) weapons proficiency. And you need at a minimum two per school, both for strategic reasons and because it provides a layer of monitoring against a lone crazy security officer.
Sorry about the digression. I am quite supportive of this phone free strategy and think it will help both educators and students. Kudos.
I think this very much a double-edged sword the more you think it through. The obvious case for it has already been made with incidents such as the Parkland shooting. Giving kids the opportunity for a potential last goodbye with family offers relatives the luxury of closure. Alternatively, having kids be more attentive towards emergency policy may increase their chance of survival and the chance of going home.
That being said, strict protocols for phone-usage in school emergencies need not impact policy in regards to school safety.
I'm a pediatrician in Ohio, and I recently met with our high school administrators to discuss our districts cell phone policy. Being in Ohio, all schools are mandated to have a policy to reduce cell phone use in schools. The administrators told me that the challenge with storing cell phones in lockers during the daytime is that students will want excessive hall passes and will be late for class because they're checking their phones at their lockers. How have you avoided this issue?
A neighboring school district used the pouches, but it took about two wks for students to figure out how to open the pouches while at school.
Hi Mel! That is absolutely an issue and why our recommendation and model policy explicitly state that storing in personal lockers is not a recommended option because of that exact problem. Having an option where students can still obtain access easily does have them finding reasons to have to leave the class and then stop at locker to be able to check their phones. We are promoting that students phones are locked and stored AWAY all day from first bell to last bell and not on them, their book bags, or their lockers.
I believe they are advocating for cellphones to be locked away in a different type of locker than the student's personal locker. There are locker systems for the school to keep the phones away from bell to bell.
Thank you for creating this guide. I have read Jon's recent book on Anxious Generation and Abigail Shrier's book - Bad Therapy and it articulated what I was witnessing first hand. As a mother of 5 and a BOE member - the issues of phone use, mental health and Bullying have escalated. We have spent so much money trying to ameliorate the symptoms while ignoring a very large contributing causal factor - smart phones. I have been trying to introduce policies in our school district and this guide will be immensely helpful.
I also agree that students need to be educated in the appropriate use of smart phones. The links I have found on After Babel will be very helpful.
I love the focus on a detailed “how to” that can be implemented by a school district. Too often policy advocates focus on the idea and neglect the difficulty in proper implementation. I hope that your proposal helps create a tipping point on this issue.
thank you so much for the words of support. We completely agree. With personal stakes in this issue and first hand experience with failed policies we felt that the only way to do this the right way wasn't to just tell schools they need to do it, but to help them go from start to finish in getting their schools phone free and to include all the supporting materials needed to communicate effectively to all stakeholders involved.
As an educator of 35 years and a psychology teacher, as well as having my masters in counselling with a focus on addiction, understanding the problems with social media and phone use in general has been my passion for over a decade. I have wanted to be phone free in my classroom and in our school for many years. However, as a teacher in a Canadian public school , one of my frustrations is that we do not see the funding to support educators with access to social media free technology for Sr students to do research in the classroom. Many school districts are reluctant to adopt a phone free program because they do not have an alternative means of providing access to this technology for learning. I would so appreciate a dialogue around this particular problem when it comes to going phone free.
The alternative is certainly to have a detailed phone-usage policy, that while not quite phone-free, still sets clear boundaries in regards to the specific instances in which phone-usage is permitted. Indeed, school activities have evolved to expect the usage of external resources in many cases, making internet access seem intractable. Granted I don't need to tell you that teachers often bear many additional responsibilities well outside of their job description, and that regulating student usage of phones is yet another issue that takes away effort that would otherwise be spent on instruction. Lateral help from external hires also seems unlikely, this is very much a contretemps.
Mileva:"...As a professional in the field of psychology, I never imagined missing the signs of my own child’s mental health decline. But when a call from my son’s school counselor revealed he was suicidal ...like so many others, ...who ...lived in the same town ..."
"Feeling Great" by Dr Burns
page238
"I did a study at a community mental health clinic in New York to evaluate the accuracy of therapists’ and caregivers’ evaluations who brought children in for treatment. I asked the children, their therapists, and their mothers to rate how they thought the children were feeling.
When I analyzed the data, I was amazed to discover that the therapists’ accuracy was about zero. And the mothers didn’t do any much better! There was pretty much no correlation between how the children felt and how their therapists (or mothers) thought they felt.
The errors were not trivial. For example, the mother of one little boy rated his depression and suicidal urges at zero. She was convinced that her son did not feel depressed, and the therapist agreed with this assessment.
How did the boy actually feel?
His depression and suicidal scores were at the top of the scale! In the margin of the assessment test, he wrote that he had borrowed a gun from a friend and had plans to kill himself on Friday. In this case, mind reading* almost resulted in the death of a little boy, but the assessment test alerted the mother and therapist to what was really going on and likely saved his life."
I'd like to point out that most semester schools, like The Traveling School, are phone free by default. When we're considering steps to take to free our high school-aged girls from the tyranny of phones, there's no better place to start than a program that takes students out into the world. Check it out: https://travelingschool.com/
This is such a great toolkit for schools! I love the idea of creating phone-free zones to help kids focus better. I've been using a Faraday bag from Leblok Security (https://lebloksecurity.com/) at home to keep my kids phones in during study time. It really helps minimize distractions and keeps them focused on their work. Just thought I’d share in case anyone else is looking for ways to support phone-free time at home too!
My daughter just started high school at a Waldorf School and they are phone-free from bell to bell. It’s not an issue for us because my daughter doesn’t want a phone, understanding the negative consequences it can have on her mental health. Parents and teens need to also retake their power over deciding when to introduce a phone.
I'd love to hear more about how staff can "support" students during the day in a phoneless environment. That's a great word for it -- it can't just be chastising. So how can we equip teachers etc. to work through this with patience and understanding?
When I was in my Catholic middle school ~2013, we had a no-phone policy. But we'd occasionally take them out and get them confiscated in angst -- there were some yelling matches between kids and teachers, questions about whether they had the right to take it. And one time a teacher dropped my classmate's phone on accident and made a little crack. Never out of any malice -- just a disconnect between our generations (we were literally babies using the iPhone 3G).
It was a little smoother in my high school, but partly because there was a strict policy where you'd get a detention slip upon sight of a phone. No one really did it -- it was part of the private-school culture to respect the rules for the most part. But I could see it being received as 'too harsh' nowadays
Great work, PFSM!!! Between this and Screen Strong's "Kids' Brains and Screens" course we have a great opportunity to tackle Haidt's 4th (and most important) action step: returning to a play-based childhood.
Very kind of you to include the printable graphics. This is an important public health crisis and it is gaining great attention and traction. Keep pushing forward. The public needs leadership on this issue, consensus is growing and change will come. I hope to see further research and discussion about WHY tech is used within classrooms and if it actually benefits learning or is, indeed as most of us suspect, actually a historical anomaly that hasn’t enhanced learning. Tech skills might be needed as say, a preparation for the job market, but could the tech learning be confined to a tech lab within the school and accessed only during formal training sessions much as keyboarding (typing) and other skills classes?
I agree! When tech was introduced into classrooms, there was no questioning about whether it supported learning. There is some research that reveals reading comprehension is better when reading on paper and math skills improve on paper as well. Removing phones from classrooms is a huge first step. Hopefully, a movement towards minimizing tech in classrooms will be next! Check out my article I wrote on Public https://www.public.news/p/big-tech-hubris-and-greed-behind
As a teacher, device use adds very little educational value and a whole lot of distraction.
personally, I prefer a faraday-pouch model for student cell phones, with a simple rule: While inside the designated buildings, the phones must be in the pouch.
If you need to make a call, you step outside the building. Phones during lunch or inside the building but after school hours may or may not be permitted. Each school must make a choice on that.
and in the event of a true emergency, the students can always open the pouch anyway.
Repeat offenders who can't exercise personal discipline in this matter may have harsher systems imposed on them.
Hard agree that there needs to be an aspect to the policy that builds student discipline and impulse control to use as foundational basis for trust. Depriving kids of the opportunity to cultivate self-control does not seem like it will set them up to be able to successfully regulate themselves outside of school.
Well, that too, but mostly I just don't trust the average school staff with total control over a student's lines of communication. I've heard enough stories about teachers or principles making complete fools of themselves, where students were entirely justified in going around them to communicate with parents on short notice.
Also, I'm still holding a grudge over the one time I stepped into an empty hallway during lunch, made a call to my parents to inform them I'd be staying late for some club activity and would need a revised pickup time, and then got a detention for it because a hall monitor saw me do it.
And that was pre-smart-phone. Schools used to have payphones for a reason, before cell phones came along. (If I remember correctly, I was LITERALLY standing right next to the pay-phone while making a cell-phone call. like I said, I'm still holding a grudge.)
That would mostly solve itself if you students were trusted to appropriately use their phones, no? The concern about giving school administrators additional power is definitely valid given the strained relationship between parents and educators. Additional measures like California freeing schools from informing parents of the student's gender identity/sexual orientation helping restore that trust either. However, I do think it is more probable than not an overall net benefit to give educators additional power to reduce classroom distractions, especially given the appalling student test scores.
I suppose the death of the hall monitor is about one of the few things you would envy about being a student today.
As a teacher, I'd have no problem with folks who say that we need to teach kids how to appropriately use technology (phones) in schools if said kids came to us with a modicum of being able to use the technology appropriately.
Also - there is the whole thing that phones and their apps are ruthlessly designed to exploit 200K+ years of evolution, which explains why, at a meeting about monitoring/limiting cell phone use at my school, 75% of the teachers are staring at their phones.
It definitely requires buy-in from all parties: students, parents, and educators, all of whom have definitely been dropping the ball on this issue. Playing hot potato with accountability isn't going to help anything. Indeed educators should not be expected to ensure students have good digital hygiene, but when parents are uninterested in helping their kids and the kids are unable to self-correct, should someone else step in to try and fix the situation?
Hall monitors don't exist anymore? when did that happen?
Hall monitors rarely exist. Sometimes, a teacher may be in the hall during a class or during their planning, but I haven't seen/heard of a designated hall monitor in my 16 years of teaching.
In my school district, there was usually 1 teacher assigned to patrol just outside the main cafeteria, where students were most likely to be wandering free once they finished eating.
This seems a really great plan, well thought out, and per survey the support among teachers for phone bans is greater than I thought.
The one problematic factor is the question of school emergencies. Instinctively parents are going to desire that their kids can contact them during a genuine emergency. The reasons given by "experts" to mitigate this worry came across as pretty thin. Not saying that to be a critic, I support the plan, but that part is not as strong as the rest.
On that topic let me float my suggestion for improving school safety. Recruit a corps of volunteer (or paid?) safety officers, probably ex-military . Vet them like crazy to weed out the unstable. They must maintain membership in a national organization and (sadly but truthfully) weapons proficiency. And you need at a minimum two per school, both for strategic reasons and because it provides a layer of monitoring against a lone crazy security officer.
Sorry about the digression. I am quite supportive of this phone free strategy and think it will help both educators and students. Kudos.
I think this very much a double-edged sword the more you think it through. The obvious case for it has already been made with incidents such as the Parkland shooting. Giving kids the opportunity for a potential last goodbye with family offers relatives the luxury of closure. Alternatively, having kids be more attentive towards emergency policy may increase their chance of survival and the chance of going home.
That being said, strict protocols for phone-usage in school emergencies need not impact policy in regards to school safety.
I'm a pediatrician in Ohio, and I recently met with our high school administrators to discuss our districts cell phone policy. Being in Ohio, all schools are mandated to have a policy to reduce cell phone use in schools. The administrators told me that the challenge with storing cell phones in lockers during the daytime is that students will want excessive hall passes and will be late for class because they're checking their phones at their lockers. How have you avoided this issue?
A neighboring school district used the pouches, but it took about two wks for students to figure out how to open the pouches while at school.
Hi Mel! That is absolutely an issue and why our recommendation and model policy explicitly state that storing in personal lockers is not a recommended option because of that exact problem. Having an option where students can still obtain access easily does have them finding reasons to have to leave the class and then stop at locker to be able to check their phones. We are promoting that students phones are locked and stored AWAY all day from first bell to last bell and not on them, their book bags, or their lockers.
I believe they are advocating for cellphones to be locked away in a different type of locker than the student's personal locker. There are locker systems for the school to keep the phones away from bell to bell.
Thank you for creating this guide. I have read Jon's recent book on Anxious Generation and Abigail Shrier's book - Bad Therapy and it articulated what I was witnessing first hand. As a mother of 5 and a BOE member - the issues of phone use, mental health and Bullying have escalated. We have spent so much money trying to ameliorate the symptoms while ignoring a very large contributing causal factor - smart phones. I have been trying to introduce policies in our school district and this guide will be immensely helpful.
I also agree that students need to be educated in the appropriate use of smart phones. The links I have found on After Babel will be very helpful.
Thanks again for this guide.
I love the focus on a detailed “how to” that can be implemented by a school district. Too often policy advocates focus on the idea and neglect the difficulty in proper implementation. I hope that your proposal helps create a tipping point on this issue.
thank you so much for the words of support. We completely agree. With personal stakes in this issue and first hand experience with failed policies we felt that the only way to do this the right way wasn't to just tell schools they need to do it, but to help them go from start to finish in getting their schools phone free and to include all the supporting materials needed to communicate effectively to all stakeholders involved.
As an educator of 35 years and a psychology teacher, as well as having my masters in counselling with a focus on addiction, understanding the problems with social media and phone use in general has been my passion for over a decade. I have wanted to be phone free in my classroom and in our school for many years. However, as a teacher in a Canadian public school , one of my frustrations is that we do not see the funding to support educators with access to social media free technology for Sr students to do research in the classroom. Many school districts are reluctant to adopt a phone free program because they do not have an alternative means of providing access to this technology for learning. I would so appreciate a dialogue around this particular problem when it comes to going phone free.
The alternative is certainly to have a detailed phone-usage policy, that while not quite phone-free, still sets clear boundaries in regards to the specific instances in which phone-usage is permitted. Indeed, school activities have evolved to expect the usage of external resources in many cases, making internet access seem intractable. Granted I don't need to tell you that teachers often bear many additional responsibilities well outside of their job description, and that regulating student usage of phones is yet another issue that takes away effort that would otherwise be spent on instruction. Lateral help from external hires also seems unlikely, this is very much a contretemps.
Let's collaborate?
Mileva:"...As a professional in the field of psychology, I never imagined missing the signs of my own child’s mental health decline. But when a call from my son’s school counselor revealed he was suicidal ...like so many others, ...who ...lived in the same town ..."
"Feeling Great" by Dr Burns
page238
"I did a study at a community mental health clinic in New York to evaluate the accuracy of therapists’ and caregivers’ evaluations who brought children in for treatment. I asked the children, their therapists, and their mothers to rate how they thought the children were feeling.
When I analyzed the data, I was amazed to discover that the therapists’ accuracy was about zero. And the mothers didn’t do any much better! There was pretty much no correlation between how the children felt and how their therapists (or mothers) thought they felt.
The errors were not trivial. For example, the mother of one little boy rated his depression and suicidal urges at zero. She was convinced that her son did not feel depressed, and the therapist agreed with this assessment.
How did the boy actually feel?
His depression and suicidal scores were at the top of the scale! In the margin of the assessment test, he wrote that he had borrowed a gun from a friend and had plans to kill himself on Friday. In this case, mind reading* almost resulted in the death of a little boy, but the assessment test alerted the mother and therapist to what was really going on and likely saved his life."
In 2022 17,000,000 Americans wanted to die. In 6-10 years MOST Americans will want to die. *
89% of US psychologists don't measure...(thus missing the lethal emotions of their clients?)
I use the scientific "BRIEF MOOD SURVEY" daily to measure anxiety, anger, and depression... all 3 in 20 seconds
*if trends continue, etc
nice work here. Can you put the toothpaste back in the tube?
Unlikely, the second law of thermodynamics exists.
Toothpaste is an expensive way to get your daily fluorine.
I'd like to point out that most semester schools, like The Traveling School, are phone free by default. When we're considering steps to take to free our high school-aged girls from the tyranny of phones, there's no better place to start than a program that takes students out into the world. Check it out: https://travelingschool.com/
This is such a great toolkit for schools! I love the idea of creating phone-free zones to help kids focus better. I've been using a Faraday bag from Leblok Security (https://lebloksecurity.com/) at home to keep my kids phones in during study time. It really helps minimize distractions and keeps them focused on their work. Just thought I’d share in case anyone else is looking for ways to support phone-free time at home too!
Genuinely curious what the authors think about Peter Gray’s work who doesn’t believe that smart phones are the problem. https://open.substack.com/pub/petergray/p/letter-51-common-core-is-the-main?r=1vio46&utm_medium=ios
My daughter just started high school at a Waldorf School and they are phone-free from bell to bell. It’s not an issue for us because my daughter doesn’t want a phone, understanding the negative consequences it can have on her mental health. Parents and teens need to also retake their power over deciding when to introduce a phone.
I'd love to hear more about how staff can "support" students during the day in a phoneless environment. That's a great word for it -- it can't just be chastising. So how can we equip teachers etc. to work through this with patience and understanding?
When I was in my Catholic middle school ~2013, we had a no-phone policy. But we'd occasionally take them out and get them confiscated in angst -- there were some yelling matches between kids and teachers, questions about whether they had the right to take it. And one time a teacher dropped my classmate's phone on accident and made a little crack. Never out of any malice -- just a disconnect between our generations (we were literally babies using the iPhone 3G).
It was a little smoother in my high school, but partly because there was a strict policy where you'd get a detention slip upon sight of a phone. No one really did it -- it was part of the private-school culture to respect the rules for the most part. But I could see it being received as 'too harsh' nowadays
So thankful for this amazing toolkit! Great work!!