Since February CCSD has been piloting a program in 10% of it’s schools where 6th-12th grade students are required to put their personal cell phones into unlocked signal blocking pouches in their classrooms for the school day. The whole district is set to implement this program beginning in August for the 2024-2025 school year. 

In my seven-years working as a classroom educator in the district, I was aware of district and site level guidelines about personal technology, but enforcement was spotty, haphazard and largely ineffective. As a technology instructor it should go without saying but, unregulated use of personal technology in classrooms is unacceptable. Period. Anyone who says that this is a non-issue has not been in a classroom in at least a decade, or has fallen prey to clever students who were smart enough to hide their usage when a parent/administrator/observer happened to wander into a classroom. During my last two-years teaching middle schoolers they didn’t even bother attempting to hide their personal tech usage. Welcome to the modern world.

I find the signal blocking cell phone pouches an interesting attempt (and a sign of how bad the problem has become for some administrators). My last year (2022-2023) I attempted to set up my room so that students were expected to keep their smartphones in their backpacks and their backpacks in one of four easily accessible storage boxes that were stationed in the four corners of the room. I had noticed the previous Spring during standardized testing, when stricter rules were enforced and supported, students did the smartphone in backpack/backpack away from student routine everyday of testing and that went well. When I tried to make it a daily routine, it did not go well. Compliance was time consuming and a huge distraction on its own, and mostly ignored.

2022-08-05 classroom backpack container-01
2022-08-05 classroom backpack container-02

2022-08-05 classroom backpack containers

I don’t know how other classes dealt with the problem, but I was aware that this was a multi-level post-COVID issue that was much bigger than students’ addiction to their personal devices. I had the added challenge that I was teaching media and robotics and having accessible technology was required, which meant that there were hundreds of moving parts every class session and students would use that as a opening to do whatever they wanted to do on school and personal technology and not engage in the assigned activity. In addition, my media and robotics courses were “electives” so students knew that passing or failing had no bearing on them graduating to high school, so that lessened the importance of what we were trying to do during our class sessions. Escalating teacher shortages didn’t help, because that meant that most of the students in my courses had not chosen to be in media or robotics, so they were that much more not interested in engaging or cooperating in the  class subject, leading to difficult experiences for those who were there to learn media or robotics. So, the use of personal technology during class time was just the most blatant example of this disengaged post-COVID classroom situation. The problem is much much larger than student use of cell phones during class time.

I applaud the district for making this effort, but I hope that they do not underestimate the push-back they are going to experience from students and parents and don’t expect teachers to be the sole enforcers, because, like my four storage boxes in the corners of my classroom, I imagine it’ll begin with great expectation in August but be largely forgotten by mid-October. And, like the COVID challenge, instead of leading to needed systemic changes in schools and classrooms, it’ll be abandoned and teachers will be left to fend for themselves. This could be another wake up call, or it could be another excuse for continued privatization and reduced funding when schools can hardly handle the load they’re expected to bear every day. 

I do not claim that my experience is in any way universal, but the majority of issues I had to deal with teaching middle schoolers post-COVID were sociological and not educational. I tried to reset the conversation every semester and spend time asking for us to think about why they were there and what we were attempting to do, but it was like shouting into the wind. I felt like I was expected to offer boutique level individual interaction with my students but with everything set up to be run like a 1950s factory and any failure was the instructor’s fault. It’s not realistic to expect that level of interaction when one is in charge of over 200 students every day for 180 days, and it might not be the same 200 on any given day. 

There are so many problems to deal with. I’m glad that they’re doing something about cell phone usage, but I hope they don’t expect this to be some universal education-fixing panacea. It’s a great conversation starter, education-community dialog prompt, but it is not the solution. Now, are they going to be brave enough to use this as an offer to reset the partnership needed between the school and its community, students, teachers and parents. This is not a technology problem. This is not an educational problem. This is a culture/community problem. And while the problem(s) is multi-level not-one-size-fits-all, it is something that can be addressed and signal-blocking pouches are a good attempt, but hardly the whole solution. And don’t forget, there are organizations and interests who want to see public education fail. But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

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Tags: disruptive tech in the classroom, banning tech, not an education problem, signal blocking pouches, CCSD

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