Kansas school cellphone ban leans on legislators, rather than learning
Banning cellphone use in K-12 education sends a demeaning message to educators, writes our columnist. (Illustration by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)
When Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed into law the banning of cellphones in the state’s K-12 schools, she — along with the Legislature — sent a suitably belittling message: Cellphones are too big a problem for our educators.
As a former high school teacher and a current lecturer at the University of Kansas, I take that new law as a personal slight, while understanding that smartphones are mauling our classrooms.
Across Kansas each school day, teachers tackle all kinds of behavioral challenges. A high school senior lashes out violently. A middle schooler makes a cruel sexual joke. A fourth grader steals a pen from the teacher’s desk. A group of sophomores mocks a freshman in the hallway.
While not perfect at solving these problems, Kansas teachers try and succeed well enough that lawmakers don’t become involved.
The problem of cellphones, however, has bedeviled our schools to the point of relying on Topeka’s elected politicians.
Why have we educators surrendered to the cellphone?
Undoing cellphone behavior
Memorizing was never easy for me. If I stored away even a short aphorism, I find it terribly important. In studying for my master’s degree in education, I found a gem that I parrot back to my teaching assistants each semester:
Learning is changed behavior.
A student can’t write a sentence? A student can’t balance a chemistry equation? A student can’t shoot a sharp photograph? A student can’t use Adobe Premiere to create an animated keyframe effect that gradually changes the video’s opacity and saturation?
As a teacher, I will help each student change those behaviors. Except chemistry.
When learning to write a sentence, the student’s behavior will change from shrugging (which is certainly a behavior) to smiling and writing, “My teacher is a hero.”
Why can’t the same learning happen with cellphones? You can’t attend my 75-minute class without being distracted by the phone you brought to school?
As a teacher, I should be able to fix that too.
The best educators know the levers of learning, how to pull them and when. We know about positive punishment, negative punishment, reward systems, social learning, modeling and more. We know that learning becomes more profound if students understand the context and eventual application of the facts. We teachers know all of this and more.
Yet, cellphones are too powerful for us to manage, administer and police in our classrooms. The new Kansas law is a wilting acknowledgement of that.
Student cellphones have been present in American schools for decades. I remember my high school students in the early 2000s boasting about how they could text — on an alphanumeric keypad! — from inside their pocket during class. That means they would mash “9” three times, “3” twice and “7” three times, just to reply “yes.” All without looking.
Even though we had more than 20 years of warning that a toxic wave was cresting above our heads, schools were mostly passive. Today, teachers consider themselves bold if they hang a cellphone organizer on their door, requiring that everyone deposit a phone in an assigned pocket. (Some students slide a deactivated phone in the slot and keep their real one.)
Interventionally speaking, the last two decades in education was a series of flimsy jabs when we were in the ring with a hungry Bengal tiger.
Cellphones are formidably addictive, reinforcing young people with small hits of dopamine via social media and more. One of my students last year reported spending 16 hours on her phone during a snow day. Yikes.
Consider also how distracting they are. I graduated high school in the 1990s. Having a smartphone in my pocket in 1995 would have been the equivalent of me carrying the following items into my first-period class: a television, a newspaper, my parents, my girlfriend who was in another class, my video game console and a smutty magazine.
With that said, am I being unreasonable by urging Kansas teachers to spar with that angry tiger? I don’t think so.
There are things that work for me in my classrooms at KU and when I speak to high school audiences. A few weeks ago, I presented some of these ideas along with two other instructors at the university’s Center for Teaching Excellence.
Digital wipe
The new Kansas law distinguishes between personal student devices (banned) and school devices (permitted). There is use in this, because a student device is more likely to have social media and other distracting apps.
However, steering students away from their devices while letting them use our devices invites student excuses. For that reason, I strongly suggest that students in my classrooms return to handwritten notes, unless they have a learning accommodation. My reasoning leans on educational research and another slightly flimsy reason: It’s easier to record the shapes of diagrams and graphs if you are taking notes by hand.
Phone first
In a nod toward phones, we actually begin each lecture in Media & Society with students using their phones for an interactive, competitive quiz. Why? Because it allows me the moment of instruction — each class — to say, “OK, let’s stash our phones now and start with lecture.” That communal goodbye to our phones has social weight while creating a daily habit.
Social pressure
Young people, perhaps most of all, respond to the signals of those around them. I begin each semester by talking in depth about how distracting it is for the people around you when you retrieve your phone for a Snapchat message. The FOMO is real. Watching you scroll through messages, I wonder what fun is bubbling on my own phone. Your personal distraction, I explain, is unfairly infectious to others.
Just leave
We all have vulnerable moments: a terrible week at work, a diagnosis in the family or a relationship break up. On those days, you might need to take a message from someone who urgently needs you. In those moments, I say, just leave. I won’t question or embarrass you. Find sanctuary in the back of the room or a hallway for your text or phone call.
Public rebuke
Having set these expectations, students in my classes still sneak their phones, often for online gaming or streaming sports. Last semester I had a memorable interaction. Seeing that a student was gaming on his phone, I climbed the stairs in the 470-seat lecture hall to stand right beside him, my voice projected with a microphone through the room’s speakers. Usually, that proximity is enough to shame the student.
Unfortunately, the match of Brawl Stars had swallowed him. “Excuse me,” I said softly. He looked up in horror and holstered his phone apologetically.
Only a few minutes later, I looked over to see him again on the phone. This time, I paused class with hundreds of fellow students watching.
“That is really distracting,” I said, “to watch you do that while I am lecturing and everyone else is taking notes.”
I didn’t raise my voice or scold. Just the facts: That’s really distracting and other students are learning.
His phone was never seen again in my class.
Some teachers feel uncomfortable about doing this, worrying that it embarrasses a student in a way that will curtail learning. My hope is to highlight the unwelcome behavior, not make the student himself feel unwelcome. Regardless, I feel empowered, because I set the device-free standard at the start of the class.
‘We did this’
Fellow parents often come to me as a university instructor and gripe about how their child is constantly tethered to their phone. They sometimes smile expecting for me to join in heaping blame on their 17-year-old.
“It’s our fault,” I always reply. “We did this.”
Our family kitchen tables silenced by iPhones, our carpool rides transfixed by only parasocial eye contact, our classrooms drowning in twitchy distraction — my generation of software engineers, parents, teachers, principals and game designers made them. It’s our fault.
And we need to own our responsibility to fix them. With more than legislation.