While some schools have banned cellphones, a blanket ban policy can be hard to implement according to an article in Education Week. Resistance comes from both students and parents. And most educators work in schools without cellphone bans.
Social-emotional learning might help by teaching students the social-emotional skills needed to help break addictive phone habits.
Instead of banning phones, adults—whether in school or in other settings—should give adolescents “the skills to have a better relationship with it” and use it effectively, says Sophie Barnes, a researcher for the Ecological Approaches to Social Emotional Learning Laboratory at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Here are several social-emotional skills that educators can teach to help students better manage their cellphone use, according to Barnes.
Self-regulation includes developing better impulse control.
Better self-awareness skills allow adolescents to think about and reflect on the role that cellphones play in their lives, and how use of the devices makes them feel.
Communication and relationship skills help students “develop the ability to connect in person” that could hopefully “decrease some of the dependence on the virtual world,” Barnes says. To help build communication and relationship skills, educators could design a classroom activity in which students have opportunities to talk to people they don’t normally interact with.
Collaboration involves students in a classroom working together to create rules around cellphone use, with assistance from the teacher. This could prompt conversations around the pros and cons of cellphones, how youth feel about their cellphone use, what their goals are for curbing use of the devices, and what they can do as a class to help each other reach those goals.
Reflection is the ability to reframe or relabel a perceived negative social media situation or interaction into a more positive one. This requires understanding how people react to various social stressors. Develop students’ skill of reappraising difficulties as a challenge instead of a threat.
Tips for teachers:
- Relate your own social-emotional skills to cellphone.
- Acknowledge it’s also hard for you to limit their cellphone use sometimes, too. Share those reflections with students.
- More empathy can go a long way. It’s not helpful for educators to see teens’ constant cellphone use simply as a sign of defiance or a lack of impulse control.
- See teenagers’ phone use in a more compassionate way. A huge source of information about their social well-being is stored in this tiny device; it’s totally reasonable for them to pay attention to that device.
- Use an approach to SEL that’s more expansive than teaching explicit skills.
- Remember, people with good self-control don’t have limitless willpower. They are good at modifying their environments, such as leaving their cellphone in their locker instead of their desk, so they don’t have to rely on willpower.
- Policies that require students to put their phones in a pouch at the beginning of classes or require students to keep them in their lockers are examples of policies created by adults that can help students. Work to get students’ buy-in ahead of time. Some students have said they are less stressed and learn better when they are not constantly checking their phones.
- Instead of telling adolescents that they need more self-control, a better strategy is to facilitate activities that create alternative routes for kids to build social status.
- Schools can provide some of these opportunities through clubs, sports, and leadership programs.
Social-emotional learning alone is not enough to curb unhealthy cellphone use. It was adults, after all, who created cellphones and social media.
Education Week
