Dealing with digital distractions in the classroom

I came across this excellent essay for teachers by Dr. Maryellen Weimer on the Faculty Focus website. Titled “The Age of Distraction: Getting Students to Put Away Their Phones and Focus on Learning,” the essay discusses the impact of mobile content in today’s classrooms.

Back when everything was “chalk and talk,” capturing and holding the attention of a roomful of learners was the teacher’s main challenge.

My own sister, the late Prof. Josie H. De Leon, used to spend countless hours perfecting the tone, delivery and presentation of her lectures precisely to combat creeping boredom, particularly among students at the back of the room. (I know the boredom part very well, because I often joined her practice audience.)

Now that mobile computing puts all kinds of information instantaneously on our smartphones and tablets, student boredom is perhaps the least of the teacher’s problems. Weimer writes: “The evidence that classroom use of technology for personal reasons distracts students is sizeable. The question is, how can teachers get students to put away their phones and focus on learning? Even with a policy and overt attempts to enforce it (confiscating the devices, interrupting class to accost the offenders, etc.), without constant surveillance from various points in the classroom, it is very, very difficult to ensure that students are not using their devices.”

Many teachers that I’ve met, even at the grade-school level, have expressed the sinking feeling that they are no match for the onslaught of rich media in the hands of their students. Weimer cites the Kuznekoff and Titsworth study that finds “…students who use their mobile phones during class lectures tend to write down less information, recall less information, and perform worse on a multiple-choice test than those students who abstain from using their mobile phones during class.”

From her own experience, Weimer avers that students really don’t multitask very well. Despite their objections to the contrary, many students will find the pull of a tweet or a Facebook update too strong to resist, at learning’s expense. Weimer observes: “If the class is large, [abstaining from using mobile devices] is all but impossible. And that kind of vigilant enforcement is not without costs. If the teacher must be constantly monitoring who’s doing what in the classroom, that distracts the teacher just as effectively as the technology distracts the students. Students and their devices have become virtually inseparable.”

So, as a teacher in the modern classroom, what can you do? How can you surmount the distractions and stay true to your calling to lead your students down the path of disciplined scholarly inquiry?

This can be a daunting task given the pervasiveness of mobile content. But perhaps therein lies the answer. Our teachers, at whatever stage in the learning continuum they may be, should lead the conversation on the true nature of information technology.

For instance, it is common to see students and even employees in the workplace breeze through editing and posting digital content online, with little appreciation of the technical complexities that such an operation involves. Furthermore, the apparent computer skills of these very same digital content consumers falter when faced with productivity suites or enterprise solutions. I recall visiting a student library in one of the universities in Sudbury, a city in Ontario about 200 miles from Toronto. The library was not that large, and there were not that many bookshelves, but because Sudbury has an incredibly efficient fiber-optic network, users of that library can routinely access even the Library of Congress. This aspect of information technology needs to be emphasized in school more, to balance out the addiction of social networking.

Weimer writes that perhaps the best way to start is by confronting students with empirical evidence that clearly shows how being online while doing a second activity adversely affects the performance of both activities. “Students who text should do so knowing that the behavior has consequences—points, grades, and most important of all, learning are at stake. But given a lot of the students I know, I can well imagine them hearing the evidence and still being quite convinced that even though other students can’t text and take good notes, they can.”

To drive home the point on how texting in class affects learning, Weimer suggests the following activity. First, give a presentation in class. Then, about five minutes before the class ends, distribute or post a list of the five or six essential points made and ask the students to check their notes.

“Were some of the students who missed most (all) of the points also texting or surfing during class? Encourage them to ask themselves the question and to look honestly at the evidence revealed by their notes. No, you aren’t going to be providing one of these lists at the end of every class, but you may consider doing it sometime during the next couple of weeks as the new semester begins. And if students are really interested in knowing how texting affects what they’re getting out of class, they should try listening and taking notes without doing anything else.”

Butch Hernandez (butchhernandez@gmail.com) is the executive director of the Eggie Apostol Foundation and education lead for talent development at the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines.