What is the purpose of school? Who do schools serve? If we can’t honestly and thoughtfully answer those questions, how do we build a pedagogical and academic framework about the what and the how of we teach?
A View From the Schoolhouse
What is the purpose of school? Who do schools serve? If we can’t honestly and thoughtfully answer those questions, how do we build a pedagogical and academic framework about the what and the how of we teach?
The context for this post is that we changed our cell phone policy this year. We’ve gotten cell phone storage devices for every classroom, and kids are expected to store their phones at the start of every class. To wit:
At SLA, we are proud to be a 21st century school and we promote responsible and thoughtful use of personal electronic devices. However, cell phones and other items should not interfere with the learning process.
Therefore, cell phones will not be permitted to be out in class. We want kids to be able to focus in class, and more and more, schools all over the country are seeing that when students have their cell phones on them during class, it is just that much harder for them to focus.
Therefore, all students will store their phones at the start of each class in the designated station. They may retrieve their phones only with teacher permission.
Students who disrespect the policy may have their phones stored with their advisor or the office for longer periods of time. Repeat issues may result in the family being called in for a conference.
As a result of this practice, students will not be available for direct contact during class time. If you have a family emergency that requires immediate attention, please call the school office at (215-400-7830)
Family Tip: Do a phone use check with your child. Take a look at your phone use totals for the last 24 hours, and the last week. When are they using their phone, and for what purpose? Talk about what boundaries they could set as an individual, or what you could set as a family.
On some level, it’s not a massive change, because we never wanted our kids scrolling TikTok in class, and we’ve always been pretty clear about cell phones not getting in the way of learning. On another level, it is a big change, because we are being way more intentional about where cell phones go during class, our school-wide expectations, and the practice of having students store their phones at the start of class is different. And the fact that we, as a school that has long embraced the intentional use of technology, made this change has garnered a lot of attention.
So we were on Vox Media a few weeks ago talking about our cell phone policy. The whole episode is very much worth a listen, and what I’m most impressed by is how thoughtful our students are about our new cell phone policy.
At the 18 minute mark, Governor Kathy Hochul of New York is interviewed, because she is advocating for a state-wide ban, and while on a personal level, it’s not awesome to hear the Governor of New York dismiss your school policy, I can’t help but think that she’s wrong.
This past week I was on a panel discussion about modern education with the CEO of Digital Promise, Jean-Claude Brizard. He talked about how state and federal policy is a blunt instrument that isn’t very good at nuance, and this is a perfect example of that. On one level, I can’t imagine a state legislature thinking that banning cell phones is a useful or thoughtful use of their time. But even more than that, it’s using a bazooka instead of a fly-swatter. When something is done at the state policy level, there’s rarely space for nuance.
Let’s start with this — last week, I was doing one of my walk-arounds, and here’s what I saw as I went into classrooms – first, let’s say this – it’s a lot easier for kids to focus when their cell phones are in a pouch at the front of the room than when it’s in their pocket, vibrating with the latest notification. That’s pretty much incontrovertible at this point, and it aligns with what the kids were saying on the podcast. But then, I also saw Matt Kay’s English class where kids were engaged in small group discussions, and one member of each group had retrieved their cell phones and were recording the discussion to be uploaded to Canvas so Matt could listen in on the conversations later.
In short, I often see teachers using their thoughtful judgement about when the cell phones are still useful in the classroom. Would that be allowed if cell phones were banned under state law? Would I have to write up teachers who asked kids to take out their phones for legitimate use? Would they even be able to? And what does enforcement of a state law like that even look like?
Because the thing is, cell phone use is complicated. If cell phones had no use in schools, we’d ban them completely with the full force of state law. We do that. You can’t bring drugs or alcohol in school. You can’t bring weapons into school. All those things are banned because there is no good-faith argument that any of those things have any educational use or value in schools. But cell phones aren’t that. There are use cases where cell phones can be a productive part of a high school student’s education, even while there are very real concerns about how cell phones can also be a profoundly unhelpful distraction from student learning. And then, there’s the very real fact that many of us – kids and adults alike – enjoy using our cell phones when we need a break at lunch. And maybe that’s ok.
That’s why we made the policy decision at the school level. Because it’s complicated. And we don’t know everything yet. We know it was getting harder and harder for kids to ignore the distractions of cell phones when they were in their pockets, and we know that there are still times when teachers want the kids to use their phones academically. We know that our kids work hard in school, we want them to still have agency and choice about how they spend their free time, and fundamentally, by having a nuanced policy, we allow ourselves the right to keep talking with kids about how they use their phones and spend their time – lessons we hope they take with them throughout the rest of their lives.
This is what I think Brizard means by policy being a blunt instrument. At the school or small district level, there’s knowledge of the school environment, and the ability to define rules that makes the most sense for the learning environment. Second, state policy has to be enforced locally, and I have no idea what enforcement looks like with a policy like this? Am I liable as principal if I don’t enforce it? Is a teacher liable if a kid brings a second phone to school (which is happening in schools with school-wide bans?) Are parents responsible if a kid brings a phone to school? And if something is state law, what’s the consequence for breaking the law? Is the state going to assign detention? And for schools that are under-resourced, is the state going to fund staffing the detention? Fund staffing the collection of the phones? Replacing the Yondr pouches when kids break them?
These are real questions that, I imagine, will be left to the schools to figure out. And policy is only as effective as it is enforceable and manageable, otherwise, it’s just political theater. And more than anything else, we don’t need more examples of politicians using schools as political theater.
Now, schools may decide that these uses aren’t worth the effort of asking teachers to be responsible for classroom-level enforcement. I respect that. However, that’s not our decision at SLA. Maybe we’ll change our minds. Maybe we won’t. But the decisions we make will be grounded in who we are as a community, and how we create the best conditions for our teachers to teach and our students to learn.
And if Governor Hochul wants to visit, we’d be happy to talk more with her about why.
“You can regulate the worst abuses out of a system, but you can never regulate goodness or excellence because goodness and excellence exist in the hearts and the minds of the people within the system.” – Tom Sobol
“Be curious, not judgemental.” – Ted Lasso (but not Walt Whitman)
For the purpose of some posts I have kicking around in my head, I’m going to define policy as something people have to do, and regulation as something people cannot do. And we have plenty of both in schools.
So much of what we do in schools are meant to prevent the worst things from happening – both kid actions and teacher actions. It’s important. Thoughtful policies and regulations make schools safer, make teacher lives and student lives better, and highlight what we value most in our schools – in short, they honor the lives of the people within the system.
But policies and regulations are, too often, blunt instruments that operate from a deficit model of thinking about the people and often have unintended consequences that don’t necessarily move us closer to creating the schools we need. Before we implement a regulation or a policy, we need to get better at asking more thoughtful questions or we will end up stifling the creativity and – as Prof. Sobol would have said – the goodness and excellence of the people within the system.
As such, before we reach for policy tools, we really need to question their use, because when we over-regulate and over-proscribe, we create all kinds of unintended consequences that can do the opposite of what we intended. So what might that look like in practice?
Let’s examine a classic regulation that many teachers have to follow all over the country every day.
Policy / Regulation: Teachers must post their aim and the state standards on the board every day.
I imagine that this policy is supposed to make sure that teachers have actually done their planning and have considered the standards that are being taught. And I’m sure it seems like a somewhat benign regulation. What could be wrong with this mandate?
There’s a few procedural things that always bothered me about this regulation — first, I’ve yet to meet the student who was excited to walk into class and see that they were going to learn about “CC.1.2.9–10.E: Analyze in detail how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text.” But I’ve seen hundreds of classes where kids dug deep into a text to figure out both what an author meant and how that meaning might have influence and relevance in their lives.
Second, are the aim and the state standards always (ever?) the most important thing that students see when they first sit down and look up at the board when they come into the classroom? (And let’s take it one step further — do kids even read the Aim / Standards when they sit down?) Often times, the start of class is about a check-in on a project, or a journal entry to help students get ready for work of the class, or a chance to review work before a presentation or number of things that would make putting the aim and state standards on the board unnecessary. And, let’s own this, there are days when the standards are a shoehorn fit or are so broadly defined as to be unnecessary to put on the board.
One might say, “It takes a minute to do, who cares if we make teachers do it on the days its not important, if it means they do it on the days it is important?” First, this is one mandate out of many that can take up too much time in a teacher’s day, because it’s not just the ‘on the board,’ it’s trying to figure out which standard is at play that day which also takes time, and second, and second, clutter – visual, intellectual, temporal – gets in the way of learning, and if we want our classrooms to be intentional places, we want to remove the clutter for everyone – teachers and students alike. Moreover, classrooms – more often than not – shouldn’t feel like we’re pulling a rabbit out of a hat when kids learn, so being transparent about what’s going on is a good goal.
Finally, we should ask ourselves about whether or not the regulation, if not followed, means that our goals are not being achieved. There’s every reason to think (and ample evidence to demonstrate) that teachers are being intentional and transparent, even when the aim and the standards aren’t listed on the board. And moreover, just because a teacher wrote the aim and the state standard on the board, that doesn’t mean that there’s a thoughtful plan to achieve those goals. So the policy of posting the aim and state standards on the board doesn’t really achieve its stated goal.
And we can agree on the goal of the regulation – we want our classrooms to be intentionally designed, and aims and standards can be tools to achieve that goal. But I don’t think a regulation is the way to get us there. We can (to quote Ted Lasso) be curious, and ask better questions – as a matter of practice and routine – to achieve those goals of intentionality and transparency.
And yes, broadly, the way we answer these questions need to be captured somewhere. But maybe not every day, every class by every teacher. I don’t know that SLA’s veteran teachers go through this explicit iteration every day, but everyone does this when they think through their curriculum. And I want to make sure that the things I ask SLA teachers to do, writ large, matter. And yes, we have had new to SLA or young teachers who needed to work on the craft of creating curriculum, and as such, we’ve asked them to use tools that have made their daily teaching explicit every day as they were developing the basics of the craft of SLA teaching.
So how do teachers play with these big questions, and what do we do as a school keep track of it?
For me, this is the realm of the unit plan, and we do have – as a matter of policy that SLA teachers need to post their unit plans. (And it took me eighteen years and countless iterations of different ways to make it easier to do this, we finally have a good tool for turning in, archiving, and sharing UbDs that makes this policy finally become truly transparent.) The unit plan is the place where teachers can, should and do articulate goals and standards, and the means to achieve those goals. Every teacher should have a unit plan for every unit, and as such, it is appropriate that every posts their units. It’s policy that (I hope) makes sense to our teachers… that achieves its goals… and that doesn’t feel like an extra step.
And since there is a policy that SLA teachers must do this, there are systems in place that make the policy make sense. First, everyone uses Understand By Design as our unit planning tool so that there’s a shared language of how we conceptualize curriculum. Then we use UbDs in our Professional Learning Communities. We peer review UbDs in both inter and intra-disciplinary groups. We use our UbDs as a way to build vertical alignment of curriculum, and to build horizontal alignment in the way that we use grade-wide essential questions and themes. Finally, creating archives of our curriculum means that not every new SLA teacher has to recreate curriculum from scratch and we can build thoughtfully, year over year. The policy of handing in Unit Plans means that all these systems and structures are more robust for everyone. That’s how the intersection of a policy (handing in unit plans) both enables and is supported by our systems and structures of curriculum design and teaching.
And that’s what we need to do — when we ask everyone to do (or not do) something, we need to ask ourselves some basic questions.
And this is true at the school level and the classroom level. These questions could — and should — apply to how teachers conceive of their classroom policies and procedures as well. We want everyone’s lives to make sense in school in ways that allow us to be safe, thoughtful and healthy in what we do in schools.
When our policies, procedures and regulations are thoughtful and supported by systems that allows everyone to understand what we do, why we do it, and how it makes us better at what we all do together, then our schools can be healthier places where the hard we do makes sense, and allows us to create places of profound learning.