Smartphone Free & Blended Learning

I am a blended learning advocate. Early in my career as a classroom teacher, I experienced the way blending my classroom with a balanced combination of digital learning and offline activities made student voice more equitable, allowed me to differentiate my instruction, and increased student engagement in my class. Trust me, when my "challenging" and "disruptive" students started liking my class and staying on task, I was hooked on this pedagogy! As I deepened my skills set, I became passionate about supporting other teachers as they integrated digital learning practices in their classrooms. This passion led me to coauthor the book Blended Learning in Action and start Yourway Learning . Seeing how much time and effort it takes teachers to implement blended models and other student-centered pedagogy led me to draft the early concept for what would become Yourwai , LINC's AI instructional design tool. All this to say, I have been an edtech enthusiast for the entirety of my career.

And yet, I am an advocate for phone-free childhoods and schools. In my earlier work as a blended learning consultant, I advised school leaders and teachers to lean into student agency and classroom management structures to deal with the distractions of phones, advocating to take the good while mitigating the bad. I no longer feel this way. Maya Angelou's famous sentiment perfectly summarizes my mindset shift -- "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."

While there are productive uses of phones in schools, we can't ignore the reality that over 70% of teachers still find phones in classrooms a major distraction. We also now have better research showing the harmful effects of smartphones on children under 16. In his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt refers to four "foundational harms" which plague phone-based childhoods: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Every parent I talk to laments the struggles I too experienced as a parent seeing these health impacts affect our children. We now know better when it comes to smartphones, and we must do better.

Schools have the best potential to make the biggest impact in getting kids off smartphones. Whether or not parents can unite to support a phone-free childhood movement outside school, school leaders can take action to ensure the 1000+ hours per year children spend in school can be phone free. Districts like Cleveland that have gone phone free report seeing a drastic difference in student attention, social-emotional wellbeing, and learning outcomes.

But does going phone-free mean ditching digital learning? I don't think so. In fact, combining phone-free environments with a balanced approach to blended learning creates several opportunities:

Ride-Along Modeling: Instead of unsupervised, constant access to leisure scrolling and social chatting, children can be introduced to technology by teachers who model the purposeful and healthy use of it for learning. Just like children ride in a car before they learn to drive, then drive with an adult before taking the wheel solo, children can have ride-along use of technology.

Purpose-Driven Tech: Children live in a "digital world," and they will work in one. We have a responsibility to build skills like online collaboration and the ethical use of AI, but we can do so using school devices which provide access only to skill building and learning.

Scaffolded Media Literacy: Using school devices only means children can learn about media before they use it on their own, building critical media literacy skills before they have to ski the black diamond that is tech on their own.

Safe Tech: Best practices in school managed devices include setting up safety firewalls and screen monitoring applications so that schools can scaffold and regulate what children have access to and how they use digital applications, creating much safer digital learning spaces.

Balance: Blended learning models like Station Rotation and Whole Group Rotation create a natural flow between online and offline learning. There is also intentional grouping and collaboration built into the models when implemented with fidelity. This creates the opportunity to build healthy digital habits at an age appropriate level.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, many schools simply did not have the infrastructure to effectively implemented blended learning. I can't count the number of trainings on blended learning I did 2017-2020 in schools with teachers who would ask the obvious question, "I really like these strategies, but how do I do it if I don't have any laptops, and the wifi goes out all the time?" We had to point to learning potential of personal devices in those moments. However, one positive impact of the pandemic era shift to remote learning is the rapid upgrade in tech infrastructure it forced. When I walk into phone-based schools now, I see kids on their school laptops, while simultaneously and constantly glancing down at their phones in their pockets or boldly out in plain sight. We now know better...and we have better...so it really is time to do better on behalf of children.