What’s In the News Wednesday: A Former Teacher’s Thoughts on the Dutch Ban of Smartphones from School Classrooms

Phones are disruptive. Not a big surprise. Once telecommunications went mobile many industries adjusted and created norms acknowledging the changes these new technologies presented. Trains have quiet cars. It wasn’t a problem for airlines because the technology didn’t generally work in flight for spoken communication, but that’s changing and the “no speakerphones in public” is becoming the generally accepted norm. You would think that phone usage in the classroom would also be a no-brainer. You would be wrong.

As reported by Reuters, the BBC and other news services, the use of smart phones, tablets and smartwatches will be banned from classroom in the Netherlands beginning January 1, 2024. Exceptions for curriculum specifically on digital skills, for medical reasons and for people with disabilities will be allowed and schools will have to decided how they organize the ban. Minister of Education, Robbert Dijkgraaf said that if the ban does not yield the desired results by the Summer of 2024 then legal rules will be created.

The Netherlands is not alone in banning smartphones in the classroom. As of 2012 98% of classrooms in the UK ban the use of smartphones. In 2016 Israel banned the use of smartphones in the classroom for students and in 2017 extended the ban to include teachers and staff members. Australia, parts of Canada, France and China have banned smartphones in its schools since 2018. So, the Netherlands is the latest to create a national policy against the use of smartphones in the classroom.

When the news broke this afternoon it was entertaining listening to intelligent adults talking about classroom norms, especially when they haven’t spent any meaningful time in a public school classroom setting in years if not decades. Having just completed my 28th year as a classroom teacher and the last three years teaching at the middle school level, phone usage of smartphones is extremely problematic and complex.

To start with, I’m the guy who is all in favor of using whatever technology is available to get the job done. A group of us came up with a project proposing using text-messaging as part of a public school assignment for one of my doctoral classes at Pepperdine University in 2005. If there’s an interactive way to do school using any form of technology, I’ve always been an advocate (and a frequent user myself).

**2012-01-25 mobile tech invasion: Anyone question that we are experiencing a mobile tech invasion?**

In 2012 I did a presentation at Macworld in San Francisco titled, Disruptive Ed-Tech: Mobile Technology Invasion of the Classroom, where I discussed how educators might leverage the increasing number of devices appearing in our classrooms. In the talk I listed banning as one of four ways to deal with this invasion and the nerd in me saw that as a wasted opportunity that would require a lot of effort for minimal gain.

**2012-01-25 mobile tech invasion: four possible reactions**

In 2012 I had a very unofficial guerrilla-style approach to using technology in the classroom. I was use to using whatever tools I could pull together with as little outside or administrative support as possible. I had no way of knowing how the expansion of mobile technology would require a lot more than a single teacher with a plan could possibly manage. It comes down to how things have changed in the last ten years and how these increasing challenges are taking something that could have been for good, the rapid availability of personal mobile technology, and made it into another expression of the sociological issues classroom teachers are expected to deal with.

It comes down to the break down of socially acceptable norms in the classroom. It isn’t about technology or smartphones. The disruptive use of smartphones in the classroom is just one expression of the breakdown of socially acceptable norms. Remember, I’m the guy who wants to use whatever tech is available and I don’t think things were better in some fabled olden times. My policy was do your work and when/if you finish you’re welcome to silently play on your devices. That seems in keeping with how life should be. Do your work and then when you’re done you can play.

Alas, completely unrelated to technology or smartphones, my policy didn’t work when ten out of forty students per period had no intention of doing any work when in my classroom. They only wanted to play with their device, or play music during instruction time, or use their device to take unwanted pictures of each other, or send inappropriate messages or images to each other, etc., etc., etc. but the problem really isn’t about the existence of smartphones.

I notice when we were doing state testing, when I assisted other teachers giving the day long exams, that the district and state required that all devices must be in their backpacks and all backpacks must be stored away from students and not touched during testing. It was amazing how quiet and orderly things were. So I began this past year with four large containers in the four corners of my room and implemented the same rules (devices in backpacks/backpacks in the boxes) during class time. We were on Chromebooks, so if a student finished work, I permitted them to play on their Chromebooks. Sixth graders and some seventh graders kind of attempted to follow the policy, but eighth graders couldn’t be bothered. With staff shortages, calls to the office often went unanswered. Calls home sometimes helped, a little, for a while. When communicating with parents they might be apologetic, overwhelmed or wondering why you were bothering them. Putting or not putting their smartphone into their backpack and the backpack into a box wasn’t the problem. And often I couldn’t be bothered contacting home about smartphone usage because I was too busy preventing girls from screaming at each other and boys from being “inappropriate.”

In the Good Day Internet discussion I know that cell-jammers were discussed and it turns out were used in the past (see the Wikipedia article, in the United States section). There were more than a few days when I would have loved to have had that option. I had a tool that would lock their Chromebook screens, but it was such a clunky, inefficient way to deal with behavior that had nothing to do with “tech.” I mean, just as soon as I released their screens they just went right back to watching YouTube or whatever. The problem isn’t the tech or smartphones. It doesn’t help that our tech is designed to be addictive, but that just means that we, as a society, need to develop “antibodies” against these behaviors. There are some fundamental flaws in what we’re doing that we are so easily manipulated and for all of our intelligence and earnestness, we can’t seem to see it.

Want to help with the problem of smartphones being used in the classroom? Let’s start by helping parents establish patterns of socially accepted norms of behavior that they can pass on to their children by example. How about creating communities where “school” isn’t just a vestigial cultural habit with no real meaning or believed-in value. How about moving away from this “Us against Them” mindset in our civic interactions. Bans don’t really work and wouldn’t be necessary if students (and parents) understood that there is a time and a place for almost everything, and we benefit most when we work towards those accepted norms of behavior. However we deal with this latest challenge, I’m hopeful that we see it as an opportunity to do education better, to rethink our purposes in investing so much in education, and to focus on solutions that move us forward.

In the 2012 presentation I suggested five principles when planning for change in Ed/Tech and one final thought. These are those slides from the presentation. Here’s a link to the presentation.

2012-01-25 mobile tech invasion: Five Principles When Planning for Change in Ed/Tech
2012-01-25 mobile tech invasion: #1 People First
2012-01-25 mobile tech invasion: #2 No One Solution/One Size Does Not Fit All
2012-01-25 mobile tech invasion: #3 Time & Energy
2012-01-25 mobile tech invasion: #4 One versus Many
2012-01-25 mobile tech invasion: #5 Organic/Value-Add
2012-01-25 mobile tech invasion: Change Reveals What We Really Believe Education Should Look Like