How will you address students being on their cell phones?

What is your plan on preventing students from being distracted by devices during your class?

If you teach in a secondary setting where the majority of your students carry a phone or upper elementary grades where students have phones, this is one of the biggest obstacles to learning you will face.

Unfortunately, I have seen too many teachers lose control of their classrooms and lose their confidence as educators because they can’t figure out how to get students off their phones and engage in the lesson.  If you go into this school year without a plan assuming students will put away their phones when you ask them to and that they won’t pull them right back out of their pockets 30 seconds later, I believe you are underestimating the issue.  

For most of our students, the relationship they have with their phones is that of an addiction.  In our current day, it is common for students to spend every “down” moment of their school day scrolling on their phone.  When they walk in the hallway, when they eat their lunch, when they are bored in class, they stare at their phone.  As adults, we have a very hard time controlling the amount of time we spend on our phones and setting healthy boundaries of when to use our phones and for what purposes.  Just imagine how much harder it is for teenagers to have those boundaries.  You will have to set those boundaries for your students!

Therefore, I advocate that if you haven’t already, you should consider having a plan in place that removes the phone from the students’ possession during class-time.  We have the opportunity to give our kids the gift of a phone-free environment.

Here is the system I have in place:

In my classroom, I have a “cell phone locker” mounted on my wall.  It’s an inexpensive plastic “shoe organizer” that has multiple pockets and that can be found at most any retail store.  My “phone locker” is hung on the wall with each pocket numbered.  At the beginning of the year, students are assigned a number and instructed to put their cell phone in that assigned pocket at the start of each class.  At the end of class when I give students permission to pack up, they can go and retrieve their phones before leaving class.  I like how this system keeps the phone visible to both my students and to me.  Students have peace of mind knowing where their phones are and I have the ability to quickly check and see how many of my students might still have phones in their possession.   

Once this system is explained, I try to get students to buy into my system and be willing to part with their phone.  This can be extremely challenging if students are coming to my room from another environment where they have had full access to their phones, so it’s important to have a plan in place for those students. 

I explain my system to students like this: “I know how addicting my phone can be to me, so I want to help you be free of that temptation for the 40 minutes you’re in my class.  Therefore, every day when you come into my class, my expectation is that you put your phone in your corresponding ‘phone locker’ so that you can focus and do your best in class.  At the end of class, I’ll tell you when it is time for you to go get your phones.”

Then I’ll give my students this consolation: “Now there might be days when a family member is in the hospital or you are waiting for a response from your boss at work so you can make after school plans, so if you really want to check your phone during class time, you can.  Just come up, stand by the phone locker, check your message, and then put it back in its locker.”  See what I did there.  I don’t want students to take my system as a war against them.  That only leads to a student-teacher power struggle.  I want them to see this policy as a guardrail against the distraction a phone can be.  It makes my policy student centered and communicates I am for them.  If a student comes to me before class and describes an important situation going on that day where they need to be reachable by phone, I’ll often give them special permission to keep their phone in their pocket that day.  After all, the goal is not to cut students off of all communication with their phones, but rather take away the everyday distractions of social media, games, etc during learning time. 

Lastly,  my syllabus clearly states what happens if a student is on a cell phone curing class.  For me, the first time a student is on their cell phone, he or she must put their cell phone up on my desk for the class period and are given 10 sentences to write and turn into me the next day explaining how they violated the classroom expectation.  Students are not given a warning at that time because they have already bypassed the guardrail I have provided them by choosing to keep their cell phone on them instead of using the phone locker.  On the second offense, the phone is turned in to administration for action according to our school handbook.  

Thankfully, I rarely have to turn cell phones into administration, and I don’t have to daily battle most students to stay off their phones.  (There’s always a couple though!) My tiered interventions to help them stay off their phones communicates to them I’m serious about this issue, especially once I follow through on enforcing the consequences with the first few violations at the beginning of the year.  

A couple other quick notes on this topic.  

• Do your best as the teacher to not check your phone regularly during class time when students can see you.  It’s hard to hold them to a standard you’re not willing to uphold.   I’m not perfect in this area, and at times for solidarity, I’ll put my cell phone in the “locker” with the students.  

• Teach from bell to bell.  Down time is the devil’s playground.  If you aren’t actively engaging your students with learning activities the entirety of your class time, students will naturally fill down time with scrolling on their phones.  

Be prepared to tackle this issue with a plan, and don’t underestimate the power that cell phones will have over your students and your classroom environment.  Plan to start day 1 with a system to establish a routine!