If you read something Wednesday morning and it’s still bugging you on Friday afternoon, don’t keep having a conversation in your head, write about it.
A few days ago, yet another hand-wringing, oh-dear-what-shall-we-do-about-it post about students and their phones came through my Twitter feed. Over at Faculty Focus, Maryellen Weimer offers her advice about “The Age of Distraction: Getting Students to Put Away Their Phones and Focus on Learning.” She summarizes some research by Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff and Scott Titsworth which joins Duncan, Hoekstra & Wilcox (2012) in telling us students are distracted by their phones and learn less. I’m not questioning whatsoever the validity of these works. Doug Duncan is a friend and colleague but all he admits that their paper is saying is there’s a correlation between cell phone use and student learning.
It’s when people attribute causation that my blood starts to boil. “My students aren’t learning because they’re on their phones. What can we do about it? How can we get them to pay attention? It’s for their own good…” Yadda yadda yadda.
Here’s what I think:
| Sticks | Carrots |
|---|---|
| Don’t ban phones and laptops from class. | Do make what happens in class more interesting and worthwhile than what they can find on their phones. Or find activities where they can use their mad searching, tweeting, texting, drawing, instagramming skills. |
| Don’t show them a graph of student marks vs phone use (Learning to interpret graphs is, itself, a learning objective of many instructors. It’s a skill that takes a lot of instruction and practice. Slapping a graph on the screen and saying, “See!” even if you try to explain it, is unlikely to have much impact.) or do some other phone-y demonstration to prove to them they’re not learning. | Do help them learn by getting them engaged with your content. Like a lifeguard that says, “Walk on the pool deck, please!” instead of “No running!”, show them what they can do, don’t tell them what they can’t. |
| Don’t start from the assumption that students will be on their phones and the instructor needs to find ways to get students to “put away their phones.” | Do with start with the goal of engaging students so that they have neither the time nor the desire to pull out their phones. |
Is it naive to think it’s possible to keep them engaged? No. Instructors using peer instruction with clickers can keep their students’ attention. And, yes, these instructors still lecture: for a maximum of 10 minutes after they’ve used some clicker questions to ensure the students are “prepared to learn,” as Dan Schwartz would say.
Is it easy to keep students engaged for 50 minutes? No, but no one ever said teaching is easy.
* the title is my portmanteau of the expression, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and the “carrot and stick” approach to driving your ass, er, mule.