Vancouver school board’s ‘device ban’ isn’t working. For the sake of our teachers, administrators and students, we need to remove personal devices from the classroom for real.
By Kelsey Dundon for The Vancouver Sun.
It’s been almost two years since the Province announced Personal Digital Device Restrictions in Schools to much fanfare and the collective relief of everyone familiar with Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. The goal of the device ban is solid: to remove distractions from classrooms and allow students to focus on learning.
The only problem?
Each school district has developed its own policy and it’s become clear the Vancouver School Board’s policy in its current form is ineffective and ultimately puts too much strain on teachers, administrators and students.
In case you need a refresher, the VSB’s current device policy for secondary school students is essentially this: personal digital devices must be turned off or placed on silent mode before entering the classroom and during instructional time.
Ask any high school teacher what that means in practice and they’ll probably tell you smartphones are hidden under the desk or tucked behind books. From there, students spend classes scrolling and texting and doing all the things these brilliantly designed devices make far too difficult for even the most iron-willed among us to resist.
It’s not students’ fault. These devices are dopamine drips.
Asking a student to resist the allure of the smartphone is unfair—even for those who are able to white-knuckle it—because research has found when it comes to smartphones, willpower drains brainpower.
You may have heard of the Phone Proximity Effect, where the mere presence of a smartphone requires so much cognitive power to resist its temptations, it reduces the cognitive capacity available for other things. Like learning. And that study was conducted on adults. I can’t even imagine trying to focus on Math 9 when TikTok is in my pocket; algebra doesn’t stand a chance against the algorithm.
We need to remove personal devices from the classroom for real.
We could follow the lead of pioneering independent schools in our region whose device bans mean smartphones are locked away all day. We could join the ranks of forward-thinking schools around the world that require phones to be stored during the school day in Yondr pouches—the same technology you might find at a concert or a comedy show. Or the VSB could simply adopt for secondary schools what is already in place for its elementary schools: phones are restricted for the entire instructional day, including class time, recess and lunch. Though I hope it goes without saying there should still be exceptions—as in the VSB’s current policy—for students who need to use a device to support medical or diverse educational needs.
School districts with effective bell-to-bell device bans have found students’ test scores have improved significantly, especially for low-achieving students. They found students connect better with each other in class and during breaks; they even found students check out more library books.
Because when we actually remove smartphones from school in a thorough, clear-cut manner, we take the pressure off teachers and administrators from having to waste precious class time policing them (their plates are already overflowing!). And we free up students’ cognitive capacity for concentrating on the things that actually matter.
A common refrain I hear from fellow parents is how relieved we are that we didn’t have smartphones and social media when we were growing up. That’s a gift we can give our children—at the very least during their school day.
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