IN THE ERA of mobile devices, our efforts to create a classroom environment in which attention can flourish must inevitably wrestle with the role that these devices should or should not play in the daily work of teaching and learning. No other topic covered in this book captures people’s attention like debates about how we should manage electronic devices in the classroom. Laptop and cell phone policies are discussed in baffled tones with our colleagues, through overheated pronouncements on Twitter, and on the pages of learned publications. Consider the following conflicting statements about banning or not banning laptops from the classroom, from opinion pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times, and Inside Higher Ed:
In Favor of a Ban
New York Times: A growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them.1
Chronicle: In class, people learn less when someone near them is surfing the web; the temptation to follow what’s on the screen, rather than what’s happening in the class, is simply too great. When I found that out, I banned laptops from my classroom. You can distract yourself, if you so choose, but you have no right to distract somebody else.2
Against a Ban
Chronicle: Students should be insulted [by laptop bans]. Telling them they can’t use their laptops or smartphones in class is treating adults like infants. Our students are capable of making their own choices, and if they choose to check Snapchat instead of listening to your lecture, then that’s their loss.3
Inside Higher Ed: Banning laptops or other note-taking devices from the classroom is an extreme stance that isn’t right for every student. I once worked with a student with learning differences whose handwritten notes were messy and disorganized. I watched as an accessibility tutor sat with him and helped him to type his words and ideas into a document on his laptop. The result was an exceptionally clear and thoughtful summary of the class. The fact is that some students need laptops or other devices to take effective notes. On that, there should be no debate.4
My favorite headline on this subject comes from an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education and reads: “Rethinking Laptop Bans (AGAIN) and Note Taking.”5 Rethinking them for (at least) a second time, and doing so in ALL CAPS, indicates the extent to which this discussion not only has dominated our conversations about student attention and distraction, but has come to seem to many of us like one of those problems that we will never fully resolve.
The collective confusion we are all feeling, faculty and students, about digital devices in the room is reflected in a 2019 article in the Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning on the subject of technology and distraction in higher education.6 The authors presented data on attitudes toward technology and its distractions, collected from more than five hundred students and faculty at a Canadian university through electronic surveys, focus groups, and individual interviews. The researchers asked both groups about the extent to which students used technology for off-task purposes in class, how much students were bothered by the distracting behaviors of others, and whether students or faculty should be held responsible for distractions in the classroom. The wildly inconsistent nature of the responses from students and faculty, and between students and faculty, offers a striking picture of the current state of confusion about the place of technology and its distracting powers in the classroom. For example, 49 percent of students reported being distracted by students engaging in off-task behaviors in the classroom, and yet they largely still expressed a desire to continue to use their technologies, even if they strayed off-task themselves—and thereby distracted others. When asked about who was responsible for minimizing distraction in the classroom, the students said they wanted the autonomy to regulate their own behavior—unless someone was really being distracting to others around them, in which case it was the professor’s job to intervene. The instructor responses were equally conflicted. Many cited laptops and phones as interfering not only with the learning of their students, but with their own teaching performance; they reported being demoralized and discombobulated by having to teach to rows of laptop covers, or by catching a student off-task. Yet, in spite of this, they resisted the idea that they should be the “technology police,” asserting that students needed to learn to regulate their own behaviors.
Our conflicting feelings about classroom technology policies allow assertive voices to rise above the fray. Some writers tell us that if we regulate student technology, we should be ashamed of these infantilizing and unjust policies; others insist that we neglect our responsibility toward students if we allow them to distract one another with devices. Those who make the former argument don’t sufficiently take into account the extent to which the technologies in our phones have been carefully designed—and are being continually enhanced by corporate mega-dollars—to exploit the distractible nature of our minds. Those who make the latter argument are putting students into an artificial technology-free bubble that will not last much beyond the walls of their classroom. The research on attention and distraction in the digital age makes very clear that we are easily pulled into the wonders of our electronic devices, even when we have the best of intentions to focus on our learning, our work, and each other. Their enticing powers mean that we need to work with each other and with our students to find strategies to make the classroom a productive environment when distractions are available at every turn.
What follows in this chapter will come as good news if you see legitimate arguments on both sides of the tech ban debate, and bad news if you came here hoping for a one-size-fits-all solution to this complex problem. I’m not going to stake a hard claim on either side of this issue for the same reason that you have to constantly remind students not to gravitate toward black-and-white answers in the messy realm of your discipline: because it’s complicated, and there are no easy answers. We can ban laptops, and that produces some benefits for attention while making life more difficult for students who would be helped by a laptop. We can adopt a laissez-faire policy of allowing all devices in the classroom at any time, and that treats students like adults while potentially harming well-intentioned students who might be distracted by the off-task work of their peers. We can also adopt solutions that fall between or outside of these two alternatives. All of these positions have costs and benefits, which we will review. Once we have done so, we’ll consider what I believe are the most important imperatives for our laptop policies: how we inform students about the problem, how we present the policies to them, and how we sustain them over the course of the semester.
Any tech policy you might adopt in your classroom will likely fall into one of four categories. Here, I present them in order of the policies I find least appealing to the one that, having spent years researching and writing about distraction, has become the norm in my teaching.
The policy that I find most troublesome is no policy whatsoever, which means students are entirely free to do as they wish in terms of their devices, and the instructor offers little or no guidance about their responsible use in the classroom. This policy prioritizes the notion that students are adults, free to make their own decisions, and we should respect their liberty and trust them to do the right thing.7 It reflects an admirable conviction that we should not feel the need to police everything students do. Imposing rules in the classroom occurs, according to the laissez-faire argument, because we are assuming that, without those rules, someone will engage in unwanted behaviors. Instead, we should trust students, treat them as adults, and expect the best of them. I love the sentiment behind this argument.
But in the realm of digital distractions, it falls short in two respects. First, it does not take fully into account the ways in which our digital devices have been so effectively engineered to hijack our attention. Adam Alter’s book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked reminds us of the challenges that both teachers and students face in our efforts to keep the distractions within our digital devices at bay, even when we have the best intentions to turn our attention elsewhere:
The people who create and refine tech, games, and interactive experiences are very good at what they do. They run thousands of tests with millions of users to learn which tweaks work and which ones don’t—which background colors, fonts, and audio tones maximize engagement and minimize frustration. As an experience [such as an app or game] evolves, it become an irresistible, weaponized version of the experience it once was.8
Both our devices and the apps that populate them give us endless short bursts of satisfaction, while the satisfaction we take from learning is usually hard-won and spaced out over time. Learning is difficult work, even when the teacher is doing everything right, and our devices offer us easy alternatives. We shouldn’t blame our students for defaulting to them during moments when they feel challenged or bored in the classroom; that impulse runs through us all.
Second, a laissez-faire approach seems arbitrarily selective. Even if we trust our students, we still have rules and guidelines that govern behavior in our classrooms. We can think about such rules as tyrannical impositions from on high, or we can think about them as conventions that help us treat one another with respect and create conditions for learning. We don’t allow students to play music on their phone speakers in class, for example, even though technically I could teach with a student’s weekend mix playing quietly in the background. We don’t allow students to engage in audible conversations while another group of students is giving a presentation. We don’t allow students to interrupt one another in discussions, or make insulting comments about each other’s arguments. In all of these cases, the conventions prevent students from diverting the attention of the other students in the room (music, conversations) or interfering with the community we are trying to form (interruptions, insults). We adhere to such rules for behavior because they help us understand how to treat one another respectfully and support the attention and learning of all. The reason we don’t view distracting devices in the same light as audible music or conversation is because distraction seems like a private, single-student issue. The student playing music distracts the whole room; the one watching a silent YouTube video seems to be distracting only herself.
Of course this is not true, as we saw in Chapter Two. I cited there studies that have demonstrated that learning can suffer when students are in view of other students who are engaging in distracted behaviors. This negative impact on learning does not appear immediately to either the distracted student or the learner, which again might make us take it less seriously than students playing loud music or insulting one another. But the evidence is clear that any students engaged in off-task behaviors on their devices can negatively impact others in the room, derailing their attention even when they have the best of intentions. I experienced a version of this myself once on a long flight, when I was trying to get some work done on my laptop. I was seated in the aisle, and in the aisle seat across from me and one row ahead a man was watching an action movie. In spite of my best efforts to focus my attention on responding to a backlog of e-mails, I could not keep my eyes from straying to that screen, over and over again, significantly reducing the amount of work I completed. Students are experiencing this same phenomenon in class; no matter how hard they might wish to focus on a lecture, discussion, or activity, they can be drawn away from it by a distracted peer.
The laissez-faire policy thus represents, in my view, an abdication of our responsibility toward the community we are trying to create in the classroom, in which we do the hard work of giving our attention to each other as well as to the course material. We will take this notion up in much greater detail in the next chapter, but for now I will conclude by saying that teachers have a role to play in helping students with the task of learning in a community setting and in supporting the attention they give to difficult cognitive work.
Next on the docket we have the complete ban of digital devices in the room, or a total ban with exceptions for students who have accommodations for their devices. The impetus behind a complete ban on digital devices takes seriously all of the research on distraction and attention that we have considered thus far, which demonstrates how easily distractible we are. It recognizes that our digital devices are especially good at playing on our distractible natures, drawing us away from the people and places around us and into electronic worlds, or electronic representations of the physical world. Those who argue for bans on laptops do so with good intentions, as they cite research or teaching experience that demonstrates that students hurt their own learning, and the learning of their peers, when they distract themselves in class. Some faculty who have instituted such bans report positive results. Trevon Logan, an economics professor at Ohio State University, was inspired to institute a laptop ban in his classes after reading Susan Dynarski’s New York Times editorial. At the conclusion of his first semester with a no-laptop policy, he described the benefits he observed for his students in several areas: “The policy had helped them to maintain focus and to take better notes, kept them engaged, and increased their enjoyment of the course.”9 In addition to these general benefits, he also documented improved grades on course exams.
But technology bans pose two very challenging problems. A total ban on technology in the room, with no exceptions, doesn’t take into account the increasing number of students who need digital devices in order to learn. As I write these words, a new semester is about to begin, and in my introductory class of twenty-two students I have accommodation letters for four of them that specify that the student should be allowed to take notes with a laptop. We are all seeing an increasing number of these students in our classes, and we have both an ethical and a legal obligation to make learning in our courses fully accessible to them. We can always ban laptops and make exceptions for students with accommodation letters, but this presents its own ethical problem: any student who has a laptop in the room has been outed to her peers as having an accommodation, something she might have preferred to keep private. In the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, Rick Godden and Anne-Marie Womack raise this argument against device bans with exceptions. Godden identifies himself as a disabled scholar who requires assistive technologies in a learning environment. A device-ban-with-exceptions policy forces individuals like Godden to out themselves as disabled in some way. A student with an invisible disability like a processing disorder might not want everyone in the classroom to know about that condition. Deciding whether to identify themselves as disabled seems like it should be left to students, rather than to a college faculty member.10
I will confess that this argument especially struck home for me because of the invisible disability with which I have lived for my entire adult life. I have Crohn’s disease, and the primary symptom for me has been a sudden and urgent need to use the bathroom. Fortunately, my disease has been mostly in remission for close to a dozen years now. But when it was not in remission, I sat through every meeting worried that I might suddenly have to make a break for the nearest restroom. If a meeting organizer had announced to the group that people were allowed to leave the room but only in the case of impending and urgent diarrhea, my needs would have been accommodated—but I would have been mortified if I had needed to take advantage of that accommodation. It should be my choice to reveal my Crohn’s disease—just as it should be a student’s choice to reveal their accommodations to their fellow students.
The second major argument against a technology ban is that it obviously closes off opportunities for learning that might be more robust with digital devices than with paper and pen. If you have students working in groups to create a concept map, you can certainly have them do it on paper, posters, or whiteboards. But you could also have them use a free online concept-mapping program, and then they could save their maps for future study, upload them to the learning management system for all to see and review, and engage in commentary and critique of one another’s work. You could do all of those things without computers, but it would take much greater effort to produce less storeable and shareable results. And while some students might distract themselves during a lecture, others might be working very productively on a laptop: taking and revising their notes, googling terms or ideas they find confusing, bookmarking articles related to the course content. International students could be using their devices to look up vocabulary words and keep pace with a lecture or discussion. “When you open up the classroom with technology,” argues educational psychologist Christine Greenhow, “you are giving students the ability to connect to translation services, with databases to do research in real time, with other people they can connect with to get questions answered.”11 Finally, cost-strapped students can often save money on textbooks by buying electronic versions, and those textbooks might contain links or other resources that are not as easily available to students with non-digital copies.
Banning technology might well increase the attention of your students in the classroom, especially if you pair that policy with the other attention-focusing practices presented in this book. I do know of good-willed faculty who institute technology bans, and who do their best to meet student accommodation needs in smart and compassionate ways. Some of those faculty teach very large classes of several hundred students or more, where they are not able to implement some of the teaching strategies to support attention that we’ll consider in subsequent chapters. But ultimately, technology bans close off many opportunities for learning, and so the costs might well override the benefits. Godden and Womack argue, from the theoretical framework of disability studies, that one-size-fits-all solutions like device bans don’t take into account the increasing diversity of learners in our classrooms: “There is no one answer,” they write, “even within one classroom. In contrast to singular best practices such as a universal ban on screens in classrooms, disability studies promotes multi-modal options and flexible design.”12 The following two policies move much closer to these ideals of multimodality and flexible design to address this problem.
When I first began writing this book, I intended to build this chapter around advocacy for a single strategy: inviting students to help you decide what your technology policy should be. This approach has many benefits. First, it enables you to spend a little time at the beginning of the semester educating students about attention and distraction. Before offering them the opportunity to make their decisions, for example, you could provide them with information about how students can be distracted by other distracted students. Second, this approach treats students like adults, in that it involves them in the process of establishing rules for the community in which they will learn. It thus fulfills the directive of trusting students: having first educated them on the issues, we trust them to make a good decision. Finally, it provides the opportunity for students to present creative solutions that might not have occurred to you. Their collective wisdom will be informed by the technology policies they have experienced in other classrooms, and you might learn a new approach from them.
At a more theoretical level, this approach to technology policies takes advantage of the power of autonomy as a motivational tool. You have likely heard of Daniel Pink, whose TED Talk on motivation has been viewed by about a billion people across the galaxy. Pink provides a deeper look into motivation in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, in which he makes the case that the three fundamental drivers of intrinsic motivation—or motivation that comes from within, rather than being imposed and controlled by punishments or rewards—are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Pink begins his analysis with autonomy, signaling that it serves as a fundamental condition for motivated and engaged work in any context. Although his book speaks primarily to readers in work environments, both the research and its implications speak just as clearly to education. The conclusions are clear, according to Pink: “A sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitude. According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school, and in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout, and greater levels of psychological well-being.”13
People value the opportunity to determine what shape their working conditions will take, whether they work in an office cubicle, on a practice field, or in a classroom. This shouldn’t be a difficult argument to accept for college faculty, whose working conditions feature as much autonomy as almost any other profession. Most of us work on schedules that provide us with generous opportunities to determine the precise shape of our days, even though we of course have plenty of obligations to fulfill. Beyond our schedules, we select our research projects and may have choices in the specific classes we teach and the committees on which we serve.
The value of autonomy, and the practical benefits that might result from giving it to my students, remains a convincing reason to me, and I believe inviting students to help craft the technology policy can work for faculty in many contexts. But I am stepping away from advocating for it as the single best solution, as I originally intended, in part because of the obstacles I encountered when I attempted to put it into practice while I was writing this book. I tried this approach in a senior seminar, which I thought would be the right place to experiment. A first-year college student might have difficulty formulating a policy that would govern the behavior of her peers, but seniors have several additional years of maturity and experience and should be able to respond meaningfully to a policy invitation. I presented the idea to students in the first class of the semester, showed them some of the research outlined in Part One, and then created a discussion thread in the learning management system and asked them to post their ideas about what our tech policy should look like.
The initial response was almost complete silence. The class met one night per week, so a few days before the second meeting I sent a message reminding the students about my invitation to help formulate our tech policy. Eventually some responses began to dribble in; in the end, perhaps two-thirds of the students offered an opinion. Some of those opinions were informative to me. One student explained that he preferred to get his books electronically, so he wouldn’t want to see devices banned from the room; another suggested that any PowerPoint presentations be posted to the learning management system, which would reduce the desire for students to take notes frantically on their laptops. These were good and important points for me to hear. But there were only a few such comments, and none of them offered a very firm opinion. For the most part, I think I can best summarize the tenor of their responses like this: “I don’t need to use technology in class, but I don’t mind if others do, even though I do find it distracting when other people use laptops.” It became very clear to me, from both the posted responses and the brief discussion we had in the second class, that the students didn’t want the freedom to create the policy for the course, and they felt especially uncomfortable with the responsibility of devising rules that would be imposed on their peers.
A few months after this experience, I came across Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, which helped me better understand what happened. Schwartz argues that we love the idea of having complete freedom to choose our destinies, but in reality we often find ourselves paralyzed in the face of that freedom. “As a culture,” he writes, “we are enamored of freedom, self-determination, and variety, and we are reluctant to give up any of our options. But clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction.”14 We have a restaurant near my house that serves reliably good food, but the menu is massive, stretching for a half-dozen pages or more. I dread the prospect of having to review all of those choices, and so I pretty much order the same thing every time. I’d be happier still if the chef just came out and told me what I was getting. Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore, argues that “we are better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice.”15 Looking back on that semester, I realized that my students were floundering without constraints. I decided in the end that setting the policy was ultimately my responsibility, in the same way that it’s my responsibility to select the texts, organize the learning activities, and work to build community and foster attention in the classroom.
I will say, however, that I enjoyed having the conversation with students about attention, distraction, and technology at the beginning of the semester, that I learned some interesting things from them, and that I had very few problems with distraction during that course (although this might also have been related to the fact that it was a small class, they were all seniors, and most of them were future teachers). You might find a way to make this strategy work more effectively than I did. My experience, in dialogue with the work of Schwartz, suggests that you might be better off presenting the students with some options, rather than just leaving it open for them to formulate the policy for you. Cathy Davidson, for example, explains that when she wanted to create a “class constitution” with her students to allow them to cocreate the course’s “terms of engagement,” she started by posting to a shared space an example of such a document from another organization, which students could then comment on and revise.16 I suspect something similar might work for a technology policy cocreated with your students. Begin with a draft policy, one created by you or someone else, and then invite them to comment on and revise it. That approach should provide the students with some of the constraints they might need in order to engage more easily with the exercise.
The policy that now guides my teaching is a simple one: whether technology is allowed in the room depends on what we are doing. Sometimes we should all be using it; sometimes the students can choose whether or not to use it; sometimes nobody should be using it. When I’m lecturing or presenting new content, the students are welcome to take notes by hand or via their laptops or other devices. When we are doing in-class writing (as we do in almost every class), we default to handwriting, but I am happy to allow students to use their devices for writing if they prefer to do so—either because they have an accommodation or just because they find handwriting too slow and difficult, as I sometimes do. But when we are having a whole-class discussion about a work of literature and what it means to them personally, I don’t want to see people staring into their screens. In those moments, I want students attentive to one another and to the conversation. They don’t need to take notes in those parts of the class, so we don’t need screens—or notebooks, for that matter. We just need the poem, story, play, or passage in front of us and our thinking and feeling brains. Likewise for the times when I invite them to do something creative, like work in groups to create a character map on the whiteboards, or recite poems aloud to one another, or watch a video of a famous poet reading her work. In those moments, what matters is what comes out of them, not what they hear from me, and they don’t need screens for that.
This policy ultimately springs from my deepest convictions about teaching. Our classrooms should be a space where students have the opportunity to engage in multiple forms of learning. Sometimes they are receiving first exposure to new information and ideas (through lectures); sometimes they are generating examples of how those ideas connect to the world beyond the classroom (through discussions or group work); sometimes they are practicing the skills we want them to demonstrate in their papers, projects, or exams (such as writing, presenting to their peers, or solving problems). The classroom should serve as an active laboratory of learning, a place where students engage with the course material through multiple cognitive streams. Some of those streams will flow more easily with technology; some of them will be diverted by it. The technology policy should thus be adaptable to what is happening at any given moment in the course, just as our use of technology in our personal lives depends on context. I don’t need my phone to talk to the fifteen-year-old twins who live in my house, so at dinnertime we put our phones away and talk; if I want to talk to my three older daughters, who are in college or living in other cities, I pick up my phone.
A context-specific device policy has had two major side benefits for my teaching. First, it has helped me think more strategically about what students are doing in my classroom and why. Do they really need first exposure to course material from me? Or can they get that from the textbook or a video? How much time have I allowed for active learning, and how much time am I lecturing? How deliberately am I thinking about the shape of the class period—the opening and closing minutes, or the middle section when students need a change of format to renew their attention? (We will consider all of these questions in greater detail in subsequent chapters.) Second, it has led to greater transparency in my teaching. I am convinced that many problems with students arise because they misunderstand the purpose of so much of what happens in the classroom. My technology policy has helped me become more transparent about the nature and purposes of our daily classroom activities, as in:
• “Today I am lecturing because this material is incredibly complex and I’d like to boil it down to a few essentials for you. You’re very welcome to follow along or take notes on your laptop; you’ll find the slides in the course web pages.”
• “We’re going to spend the last fifteen minutes of class thinking and talking about why we should still read poems like this one: Why do they still matter to us today, two hundred years after they were composed? You don’t need to take notes for the next part of class, so I want devices closed, so we can give our full attention to one another.”
• “We use groups in this context because I want to help you connect with the peers you’ll be working with on your final projects. You don’t need your devices here; I want you to focus on working with each other, and you will only need one person to record your work on the whiteboards around the room. Afterward you can take pictures of the board if you want to preserve the ideas for yourself.”
Such transparent talk articulates whether they will need their devices, but that’s really a side issue. More importantly, it clarifies the purposes of all of our work. It makes the classroom more like a communal learning experience than like a magician performing for his mystified audience. The device policy connects to the rationale for everything we do, which means we have such a rationale—and students deserve to know about it.
I have attached the document that presents this policy to my students as an appendix to this book. As you will see, it does include an invitation for them to comment on it and recommend changes. I thus do allow for the prospect of a policy cocreated with my students, which means my approach really combines the third and fourth options we have just considered. Practically speaking, I have not yet seen much willingness on the part of my students to play a very active role in the policy-creation process. Your students might well be different from mine, and might jump at the opportunity to shape the technology policy of the classroom. If that’s the case, I still would urge you to give them some initial ideas or a draft policy to work with, followed by an invitation to comment and revise, rather than just leaving it open for them to craft from scratch.
I favor the student-generated and context-specific policies, but I also believe that good-willed people can disagree and may choose one of the other policies, some variation or combination of them, or some alternative I have not articulated. More important to me than the details of the policy is that whatever you choose provides you with an opportunity to engage in a conversation with students about their technology use. That conversation can educate them in ways that will make them better students and better citizens of the classroom and campus community. You reading this book means that you are becoming more informed about the complexities of attention and distraction in the classroom and the way that our devices intensify those complexities. How much of what you are learning here, or in other resources, can become part of the conversations you have with students? How would you translate the arguments of this book into the technology policies you craft? How would you critique or respond to these ideas? How would they affect the way you present those policies to your students?
One excellent example of a faculty member informing students about the role of technology in their lives and in her classroom comes from Ashley Waggoner Denton, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, who has made available through her website a set of slides that she shows to students in her psychology classes, and which others are free to use or adapt. The slideshow is entitled “Making Informed Decisions: Laptops, Smartphones, and Your Studies,” and it includes in the notes Waggoner Denton’s explanations of each slide, as well as links to references and related sources.17 The slides themselves provide summaries and graphs from experiments or observational studies—all of which have been replicated—demonstrating first how the use of distracting technologies can harm the learning of the distracted student, and second how it harms the learning of those around him. She also reviews some of the studies that have been conducted on the advantages of taking notes by hand over taking notes on a laptop. Finally, she reminds students that technology use can also interfere with their studying outside of class, and provides some resources from which they can learn how to manage their device use while studying.
What she does not provide are clear answers about what all of this means for a technology policy. She explains to students that there are no easy answers when it comes to device use and learning, but that understanding the research can help them make better choices:
In support of facilitating her students’ decisions and the classroom policy, her presentation includes two slides where students are invited to share their thoughts about what policy recommendations they would make based on the research. Waggoner Denton has built even more flexibility into the presentation by giving instructors permission to use and adapt it to their own needs, which means that you can use her research to educate students about the issue, and then provide the reasoning behind whatever policy you have developed. The open-source nature of the presentation seems like it would be especially helpful to faculty who are teaching large classes, for whom a collective effort to set a technology policy might prove especially complex.
Whether or not you use the excellent work developed by Waggoner Denton, and whatever policy you choose to implement, your rules should be presented to students in ways that provide a clear rationale for them—and that, better still, acknowledge the complexity of the issue and demonstrate your empathy for the challenges your students face in keeping their attention in the classroom rather than on their devices. The first time I addressed devices in the classroom was in the spring of 2008, when I put the following warning on my syllabus: “PUT AWAY AND TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONES! If your phone rings or vibrates in class, or I see you checking it or texting, you will be absent for that day.”
The all caps and exclamation point certainly let students know that they were NOT (!) allowed to use their phones in class. But this was the entire statement. I made no effort to explain why those devices represented such a problem in my courses, which run largely through discussion and in-class activities of various kinds. After a few years of yelling at my students on the syllabus, I learned to explain my (evolving) policy more clearly: Since so much of the work we do in this class depends on your participation, it’s important to me that you are here and present for one another. In our classroom, we listen to each other as much as we listen to the texts, and that listening is supported by respectful attention.
As it turns out, research on syllabi suggests that providing this kind of rationale to students makes a significant difference in terms of how they perceive the course and the instructor. In a 2011 study, two researchers presented students with a sample syllabus from a candidate for a potential faculty job that was written in either “warm” or “cold” language. A cold-language syllabus offered facts, information, and policies. The warm-language syllabus provided a text that was more empathetic and personable and—most important—offered a rationale for the course’s policies and assignments. The students rated the warm-language instructor as more approachable and more motivated to teach the course. Although their questions did not specially address the technology policy in the syllabus, the researchers drew conclusions that seem eminently transferable to this issue:
Presenting students with an effective syllabus written in a friendly, approachable tone can influence perceptions of the instructor and the course. Consequently, creating a syllabus for a course should not be an afterthought for instructors. Indeed, care should be taken in developing the syllabus with particular attention to its tone, because impressions are made that may facilitate faculty engagement with students.18
As you work on the policies on your syllabus that talk about the way digital devices can detract from the sense of community in the room, take another look at that language and evaluate its temperature. What does it convey about the kind of experience the students are going to have with you? One in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “stern preceptor” keeps an eye out for offenders, or one in which teacher and students work together to help one another be present? A warm-language introduction to a technology policy (or even separate from such a policy) might begin along these lines: “The time we have together each week is short, and so I really want us to remain present for one another during that time. I hope you will learn from me, and from your fellow students, and I know from past experience that I always learn from you. We will thus make being present a core value of this class, and there are a few ways in which I will try to support that value…”
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at least a dozen variations of the split-screen meme in which someone is yelling something about the course on the left panel, and the right panel features a smug and/or angry cat responding, “It’s on the syllabus.” No joke about college teaching might be more popular than ones that riff on the notion that students frequently ask questions that are answered on the syllabus. Of course, the reason students frequently ask questions about the syllabus is because we present it to them on the first day and then never revisit its contents. We use the syllabus to provide a sales pitch for the course, information about our office hours, an overview of the assessments, an academic integrity policy, the schedule of readings, and more. But it’s the first day of the semester, and students are getting five or more of these documents, decorating or restocking their rooms, reconnecting with their friends, and doing all of the other things that students have to do. We should not be the slightest bit surprised to find that they don’t commit to memory every policy on every one of their syllabi.
However warmly and convincingly we present our technology policies to students on the syllabus and on the first day, these policies will need revisiting and reaffirming throughout the semester. That can take many forms, depending on your class context. Let’s assume that you have created (or cocreated with your students) a thoughtful policy, that you presented it in warm language on your syllabus, and that you devoted time on the first day of the semester to discussing it. Having done that, you could follow up in three easy ways:
• Midterm evaluations. Almost every teacher I know receives end-of-term evaluations from their students, which are helpful for our ongoing development but useless for the class we just finished teaching. Many teachers, including me, thus have students complete evaluations halfway through the semester, and use those evaluations to modify our teaching and remind students about policies or procedures of which they might have lost sight. A midterm evaluation can easily include a question designed to remind students about the device policy and reorient them toward its purpose. Variations could include: “To what extent are you noticing distracted behaviors in yourself or your peers in class?” “What can I do to help ensure that we are bringing our attention to one another in class?” “How well are you adhering to the technology policy we created together?”
• Notebook or discussion-board responses. One check-in midway through the semester will be far more effective than no check-ins at all. But if you have some regular way that students engage informally with the material from your course, you could fold your follow-ups into that process. For example, once or twice per week, students in my course write one-paragraph exercises in response to our readings or discussions. If I am noticing distraction as a problem in my class, I can pose one of the questions above at any point in the semester, and then use their responses to host another discussion about the issue.
• Individual reminders. Occasionally it happens that a class is generally doing really well in terms of their management of potential distractions, but one or two students are consistently off-task in class. In those cases I prefer to reach out to those students individually, either by e-mail or as a quick note added to a returned writing exercise. I keep these notes as neutral as possible: “I have noticed you using your phone frequently in class, and wanted to remind you about our technology policy. If you are having a problem that I can help you with, let me know.” One of the things I have learned from sending such notes is how surprised students are to find that their off-task device use is visible to me. Once they realize this, the behavior usually (but not always) stops.
The warm language that you used on your syllabus should persist through all of these class conversations or individual comments. Students might be using their devices to manage difficult problems at home, to communicate with a sick relative, or to deal with childcare. If you begin these conversations compassionately, you are more likely to find solutions that work for both you and the students—and you will be less likely to assume the role of the technology police.
You can also always ask the students themselves to help you determine how to hold them accountable to the class’s polices on technology and distraction. In November 2019, I attended a workshop on digital distraction and attention at the annual conference for faculty and administrators who focus on teaching development in higher education.19 The facilitator for this section walked us through an exercise we could conduct with students in the first week of the semester, in order to educate them about the way multitasking interferes with their learning and the learning of their peers. The final step in the process she modeled for us was to have students “plan new behaviors” that would help them use their technology responsibly in the course. She suggested having students write a paragraph that responded to each of the following three prompts:
• Write out the one change they plan to make
• Share their ideas with you and peers and get feedback
• Develop and implement an easy way to monitor their plan and its effects over time
Following a process like this one hits many of the best ideas we have considered in this chapter. It allows you to create a policy that fits with your teaching context; it provides an opportunity for you to educate your students about the challenges of distraction and attention, whether you use a resource like Ashley Waggoner Denton’s or some other material; it encourages the students to assume some agency in relation to the potential distractions in the room; and it includes explicit thinking about how the decision that both you and your students make at the beginning of the semester will be monitored and reaffirmed throughout the term.
Flower Darby, an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University and the author of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes, has written about the way many online teachers mistakenly take a slow-cooker approach toward their courses. They create the content and assume the course will just slowly simmer away without intervention until the learning has been cooked all the way through.20 We have to be careful that we don’t take a similar approach to our technology policies and the ways in which they support or interfere with attention in the classroom. If we value attention, as we should, we need to develop thoughtful policies, engage students in conversation about them, and continue those conversations throughout the semester.
The year I graduated from high school, a commercial appeared on television in which a young man is lying around in his room listening to music, rocking out to his headphones. His father comes in, switches off the music, and then confronts him with a box of drug paraphernalia, asking him repeatedly where he got it and who taught him to use drugs. After initial denials, the boy finally responds angrily, “I learned it by watching you!” The camera shifts to the shocked face of the father, and the voice-over arrives to pound us over the head with the moral: “Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs.” Even if you were not hanging around in a living room in the Cleveland suburbs watching MTV in the summer of 1987, you’ve likely heard someone utter this phrase, in jest, as a description of the ways in which we sometimes say one thing to children or students and then do another.
You see where I’m going with this, right?
If you are the parent of young children, or a caregiver of any kind, you might well want or need to have your phone available in class and have the numbers of your key contacts set to ring in case of emergency. Otherwise, you could make your reading of this book the moment that marks a new habit in your teaching life. From now on, you can engage in a very simple behavior designed to remove one key distractor from the classroom: your own phone. Leave it in the office, and keep your mind free to focus on the students in front of you. I carry my phone with me everywhere I go, as most of us do these days, with one exception: I don’t bring it to the classroom. Initially this was a little unsettling, as I was so accustomed to the feel of it in my pocket or the sight of it on my desk. But after a couple years of this behavior, I have come to embrace the freedom it seems to bring to my attention in these moments when I most need it and want to model it for my students. And you can bet I give myself a little time to unwind on Twitter when I get back to the office after a couple of hours away from my social media accounts and e-mail.
Unlike a 1980s public-service announcement, I won’t beat you over the head with this message. Occasionally checking your phone in class probably won’t make the difference between attentive and inattentive students. But of course that’s true for everything I am arguing in this book. Not one of the strategies I have recommended here or will recommend in Part Two will turn your classroom into a distraction-free environment. They all represent small opportunities to build a culture of attention, rather than single solutions. But I am a firm believer that small decisions we make in the design of our courses, classroom practice, and communication with students have the power to accumulate into significant achievements, and the absence of your phone in the classroom—and the presence of your attention—represents one of those small decisions.
Students did not learn to distract themselves with their phones from watching us, but they may yet learn from us the value of becoming present to one another, and to fascinating ideas, in the communities of our classrooms.
In this chapter and all of the ones that follow, I make practical recommendations for building and supporting an attentive classroom. Each chapter from here out thus includes a quick recap of those recommendations. You will find them repeated and compiled at the conclusion of the book as well. I highlight the recommendations in this way so that you can return to the book briefly at the beginning of each semester—or when attention flags in the fourth, ninth, or twelfth week of the course and you need a quick reminder of some of the ways you can stir it back up again.
• Use your technology policy, whether you impose it or cocreate it with students, to have a conversation with your students about attention, distraction, and technology in your classroom. Provide the rationale for your decision, and ensure that you are being fair to students with accommodations.
• Present these explanations, and your technology policy, in warm language. Be empathetic. Attention is hard for us all, and you have designed your policy to support your students’ learning and the continuous development of the classroom community.
• Sustain the conversation about responsible use of digital devices throughout the semester. Use journals, discussion boards, or midterm evaluations to provide opportunities for students to report their experiences with distraction and for you to remind and reinforce the policies you have established.
• If you wish your students to engage in device-free attention at least sometimes throughout the class period, model that behavior yourself. When students are working in groups, or arriving in the classroom, or leaving the classroom, use those moments to get to know them a little better, either as persons or as learners.
When it comes to the policies we create for digital devices in the classroom, the only mistake we make is not to address the question at all. A thoughtfully crafted technology policy—one that you discuss with your students—helps us avoid that mistake. Technology policies can be imposed like fiats from on high, or they can be evolving guidelines that educate students about the impact of technology use on their peers and their learning (and the professor). More important than the details of the policy, in my view, is the education that you can provide to students about their technology use and its intersections with their studies and their futures. Matt Reed, the author of a regular column for Inside Higher Ed, argues that “device etiquette,” or how we manage our devices in the presence of each other, “is becoming a new workplace skill.”21 The graduates who are most successful in their careers may well be the ones who understand how to work productively with their devices and how to step away from them to manage their personal and professional relationships. They know how to work productively in the office, at home, or at a coffee shop, but they also know how to listen respectfully in a meeting, attend to a client over dinner, or brainstorm creative new ideas at the corporate retreat.
Each of us has an opportunity, however small, to shape for the better the way our students manage their relationship with technology. Our cumulative work can create students who feel no compunction at slinking behind their screens at any time or place, or who understand how and why they should carefully manage their relationship with their devices in class and beyond. Collectively, we need as many humans as possible to get to that latter place. Teachers can play a role in getting young people there, and the technology policy provides the stage upon which we can fulfill that role.
I have included as an appendix to this book the technology policy from a recent literature class I taught. This document was presented to the students on the first day of the semester. They were given the opportunity to read it on their own after class and e-mail me with questions and comments, and then they were asked to sign it at the beginning of the second class. Before spring break, I issued a midterm evaluation in which—among other things—I reminded them about the policy and asked them to describe whether it was still helping them stay on task in the classroom. Readers are welcome to steal, borrow, and adapt any part of this policy or its implementation as they see fit.