Massachusetts legislators are currently considering following a national trend and banning cellphones in schools, as the Lexington Observer reported recently.
Although smartphones are likely detrimental to many students’ mental health and ability to stay engaged and learn during class, passing a statewide ban would be a mistake—and not just because of the cost to Lexington Public Schools, although unfunded mandates are certainly a consideration.
The reason departs from conventional wisdom. Even as disengagement in schools has soared in recent years, some teachers have also taken advantage of the advancing capabilities of phones to redesign their classrooms and reengage students with educational applications.
To be clear, according to anecdotes and early research, this appears to be far from the majority.
In traditional classrooms where students are expected to keep their eyes on the front of the classroom and follow the teacher’s lesson plan in lockstep, student cellphones present at least three challenges: disruption when students use their phones for non-academic purposes, access to AI for cheating, and distraction when students’ attentions are diverted by alerts and toggling between different apps.
These reasons make it critical that educators are empowered to ban phones from classrooms and schools where their hallway use can provoke fights and other anti-social behavior.
Districts should have the infrastructure and the legal clarity to be able to use their resources to purchase pouches or lockers to store them. Alternatively, schools should be able to deploy technological solutions that can be three to five times more affordable than pouches and don’t need replacing when a pouch breaks. One example is The Commons App, which allows schools to block distractions on students phones when they’re on campus but also allows students to retain them for emergency use.
In my own classroom at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, I don’t allow students to use phones during most of class. That’s because I teach using case studies and the Socratic method. I expect all students to participate in a group discussion to deepen their understanding of an innovation theory by working through a specific situation. If students are instead paying attention to their devices, the conversation suffers and student learning slows.
But I’m not absolute.
I leverage my students’ devices at key junctures in class to do checks for understanding of foundational concepts or to take polls to understand where students have differing viewpoints that we should dig into.
That flexibility and intentional use has helped improve my teaching and student learning.
It’s what I hear from some other educators as well who are taking advantage of smartphones to reengage students. They want the ability to take advantage of applications like Duolingo or Speak for learning language, for example.
Given that students start in vastly different places in their learning and therefore aren’t ready to learn the same things on the same day, these apps can enable students to stay more engaged and on task—an improvement over the required foreign language labs some of us had in college, for example. And then there are times to silence the phones and talk with peers and the teacher in group conversations.
Lawmakers and phone skeptics will be quick to note that most bans have an exception for educational uses. But that’s a judgment call.
It’s not hard to imagine how that could get messy fast as people outside a classroom debate a teacher’s use of a particular application.
What’s more, early research on cellphone bans has shown only small gains on average—and a few negative consequences. The average gains even masked some declines. For example, one study in India that showed paltry gains and attracted media attention also found negative but statistically insignificant declines for second-year students and no impact on STEM majors.
State policy should instead focus on the student outcomes and choices we desire—and then empower educators far more than we do today to shape the inputs that meet those ends.
That means that categorical funding to support smartphone bans isn’t a good idea either.
A better approach for Massachusetts than banning or allocating restricted funds would be to support districts in implementing the best policy appropriate for their context and to use the state’s ability to aggregate purchasing power across all of its districts to get significant discounts on a few different approaches to dealing with the smartphone challenges that schools face.
So yes, that means clarity that schools can choose to ban phones and that they have the infrastructure and wherewithal to make it happen. But it doesn’t mean a top-down blanket ban either.
Michael B. Horn