Reading thousands of articles about schools and education and learning over the past decades has honed what I’ll call a “what they really mean” responder in my head. It’s the little piece of brain software that triggers every time I come across a quote or a description that leaves something out, some snippet of context that is obviously present but just gets ignored.
Here’s an example from a post in the Hechinger Report from last week discussing the distraction caused by cellphones and smartphones in the classroom:
“On the one hand, we know that most students bring a mini-supercomputer to school every day, a device with vast potential for learning. On the other hand, just how and even if smartphones might help students learn remains a troubling question.”
On the surface, that quote doesn’t make much sense, does it? We know that smartphones are learning tools, but we don’t know if they are learning tools. Seems like a contradiction. It makes more sense when you figure out “what they really mean,” which is that smartphones are great devices for kids to learn stuff they are interested in, but when in comes to learning school stuff, we struggle to see the connection. And so, as is the case in this article, we start looking for reasons to ban them outright. (Thankfully, the author provides a fairly balanced debate about that.)
But hand-wringing about smart phones misses the bigger concern, that of the modern relevance of our curriculum. And I emphasize “our.” We situate success or failure of almost any technology or pedagogy in terms of achieving mastery (of some sort) over the subject matter, the stuff, which all too often is delivered in isolated pieces with little connection to the real world. It’s a classic case, again, of trying to figure out how a technology can help us do the wrong thing right, when the right thing would be to start where the learner is rather than asking them to start where we are.
As Roger Schank wrote a few days ago:
The problem in education is simple enough folks. It’s boring. It is irrelevant to the interests and needs of most kids. They don’t need to learn classical Greek or ancient history. They should be encouraged to learn what they want to learn. Could we do something radical and ask kids what they want to learn how to do and then help them learn how to do it?”
Perhaps if we did that, we’d have an easier time of figuring out the value of smartphones in the classroom.
We often seek to ban that which we do not understand. Even if we can see the smartphone connection to students’ learning about material that they are interested in, we don’t see the connection to the things that we think they should be learning. And we are frightened by the lack of control that smartphones bring with them, so we seek to ban. Maybe we as educators need to have some frank self-reflection conversations about our own anxieties and how they are entering the classroom.
As an educator, I see great value in allowing students to use the super-tool that is the modern smartphone. But at the same time I see the constant problems that pop up by putting the very adult technology in a child’s hand. Especially, when working in a district that has yet to achieve one-to-one in regards to technology, smartphones can assist the students is powerful ways but it is that same power that leads many a student and sometimes their parents as well to suffer from its uses. As for Schank’s comment about school being boring, he clearly hasn’t spent time in my Ancient Civilization class. #kidscantgetenough
I completely agree about the “what they really mean” but but does it really lead to Schank’s position?
The relevance argument has some awkward elements to it, I think:
– it’s not age-neutral. Not that it should be but an eighteen year old choosing what is relevant is different to an eight year old.
– it is prone to belittling. Here in the UK there was a wonderful readioninterview recently where a black teen from London complained of “relevant” teaching of Shakespeare through rap.
– it confines children to echo chambers. Like many of us adults, children often don’t know that they don’t know. Might it not be an adult’s responsibility to take children to the top of the valley and see different vistas that they can then choose to explore or not?
As Andre Gide said, any caterpillar who tried to know himself would never become a butterfly
One of the issues I think many teachers are struggling with is not so much that students aren’t capable of learning with smartphones, it’s that many choose to message and play games instead. I’m sure lack of relevancy and choice play roles, but I also think having the vail of 24/7 access to their social scene–which probably trumps everything else for these teens–is a huge distractor, so teachers feel they have to do things like ban phones, collect them at the beginning of class, or get so frustrated that they start suggesting the installation of cell phone jammers. I wonder about the roles that self control and maturity play in this as well – are teens mentally equipped to use their smartphones responsibly i.e. to support the task at hand without feeling an overwhelming need to check the latest social news (assuming the debunking of the existence of multitasking)? Do we think that since we adults can be responsible with phones (ok, some adults have self control issues with their phones too!), teenagers should be capable of this as well?
To be honest, I’m having a difficult time thinking through this and writing out my thoughts because I personally know the power of having a small computer with a camera and Internet access on me at all times, but I see teachers really struggling to maintain students’ attention when phones are allowed. It doesn’t seem to be as easy as letting students learn whatever they want – I fear some students would choose not to learn anything; they would rather hang out on Snapchat all day talking to their friends. What then?