More videos from Bradley Busch
Video transcript
Okay bradley what is tip number four please tip number four uh is uh to absolutely uh ban mobile phones in schools i love nothing more than a definitive statement i feel like i’ve been hedging it a little bit to like consider wait times without giving a number and stuff whereas this one uh you know the more a research i read on air and be just anecdotal evidence going into schools who have different policies um i think the area of research is complicated because sometimes they talk about in research technology in the classroom and technology can include school issues tablets that you can limit what they go on and that’s obviously i’m not even saying they’re brilliant if i’m honest but it’s a different proposition to mobile phones um because i think there is a potential learning game to be had with mobile phones but i think the learning loss outweighs it and that’s before you even get into the pastoral and safeguarding side of things i i’m amazed it’s amazing how these things just kind of creep in in the last um and i think they’re an absolute nightmare i love this right let’s let’s dive into this a little bit so um you’ll have seen probably more um mobile phone kind of school policies that i will have because i’m never on the lookout for these but i’m going to be from now on um are we so we’re saying best policies just to blanket ban them is there is there is kind of nuances to that that also work like have them at lunch and break you see stuff like that so yeah so um okay let’s start with the research i guess that is a good starting point um there’s a really nice quite large scale study uh with a large amount of schools that compare different policies so schools that didn’t have a mobile phone policy schools that had one that didn’t really enforce it versus schools that had one uh and i think their policy was if i see it in class or in the corridors i’m taking it but i think they were allowed at a lunch and break which even then i’d even go further than that um and they checked these schools i think that’s about five years so we’ve got a good longitudinal data and they found a significant increase in i think gcse results uh for schools that banned mobile phones uh and that impact was felt double for the struggling and disadvantaged students wow um so then you can kind of talk is there a moral imperative around how do we help you know if we talk about leveling up and lost learning and all that kind of stuff you know maybe it’s um it’s a good policy anyway but it’s especially helpful for struggling students um there’s been studies all over the world that have linked the amount of time you’re on your phone in class is negatively correlated um to worse exam results or learning um i mean i don’t think that’s i don’t there’s much doubt about that um we do hear some pushback uh schools tell us uh especially in the first few weeks when they try to enforce it so parents want their child to be able to be contactable um and so i guess it’s my place as a psychologist say here’s what would work as a blanket policy um i definitely wouldn’t have them in the classroom though like that i can say pretty kind of confidently um because also like they’re called mobile phones but like no one’s using them to make phone calls like we have to kind of acknowledge this i can’t say this all the time but like they use them to access porn gambling social media gaming uh yes you can do learning stuff on there as well and there are some good retrieval apps for example um but like practically how most students are using them are the way adults want them to be using them um and i just think i see a notable difference in schools that have them compared to schools that don’t and that’s regardless of state versus private boys or girls for like schools that have you know strict mobile phone policy as an outsider when we go in we can tell the difference almost immediately it’s really interesting right a couple of things on this i i’m fascinated by this area and the first is you’re absolutely right that i the schools i’ve worked in tend to have the policy that if you see the phone the teacher takes it what a flipping nightmare that is because that’s never a smooth transaction that it’s never okay you’ve caught me here’s the phone it’s always no no no you give me another chance and it just like and then you’ve got to go through the pain of because some of these phones cost like about 700 quid and if you lose them it’s all going to be kicking off so then you’ve got to hand them into reception with the name and it’s such a pain so yeah i completely agree with you that that is a flipping pain from a teacher i’ll tell you the other thing so every couple of years i reread one of my favorite books i don’t know if you’re familiar with it bradley a deep work by cal newport it’s one of my all-time favorite uh books um and it the the notion is you know a really good thing to do is get into this state of deep work where you’re uninterrupted research tends to suggest you need about and you can last until about 90 minutes and then you know you can’t concentrate anymore and so on so i’ve been trying to have numerous projects i’m trying to get into deep work even if i have my phone on silent and it’s visible or even if it’s not visible but i know it’s in the room i can feel myself my mind is wondering it’s crying out just to either check twitter or football or anything like that and i just can’t the difference it makes even if i’m not looking at it is phenomenal and i can only assume that if kids have it in their bags or even in their pockets and they don’t look at it in lessons it’s still going to be it’s not like it’s having a negligible neutral effect right it’s still going to be nagging in their mind and imagine so some of my favorite mobile phone studies there’s one but which i should say has been contested so it’s not you know a set rule but they found just having your phone what you’re describing in on silent but near you they caught the mere presence of it they found it led to a significant uh reduction in concentration uh i’ve read studies that found if you have your phone next to you while you’re eating food uh people rape their food as less tasty uh if you have your phone next to you when you’re um speed dating or in like a social group uh the rate the person is less interesting um and that’s before we even get into like the memory and the learning like the interruption side of things um so yeah you see kind of all these kind of studies and that’s how to say before you can get into the safeguarding there’s been some horrendous stuff around teachers being filmed and putting on that is not great um so yeah your experience what you described the research would certainly uh support that and it’s just yeah i wouldn’t want to be in charge of 10 people’s 700 pound phone either like that sounds like a nightmare and one final study that i thought i’d just mention is so basically you’re competing it’s a test of self-control right it’s kind of like your work versus the phone is the self-control test we know from research that in your adolescence years your ability to delay gratification changes significantly so we know people age 25 tend to um the balance between sensation seeking and impulse control has kind of leveled out a bit more whereas in your teenage years you’re basically you’re all accelerating those breaks you just want to do stuff so it’s harder i think to manage distractions in your teenage years bear in mind when i was at school this is going to show my age i was addicted to the game snake on my knockout there’s every distraction in the world on your phone and there’s no way a teenage brain versus all the geniuses at silicon valley designing smartphones it’s just not a fair fight um and so sometimes we get we get hear the argument maybe we should expose students more to phones because it’s part of society now it’s kind of self-regulation but like i wouldn’t have my phone out you’re not have your phone out in most jobs so why would i have it at school and i hate the argument that if something’s bad for you we should just expose people to it more and teach them self-regulation because we ban stuff all the time like we ban smoking in school when we burn alcohol for under 18s and i just don’t see why this would be any different really interesting let me play devil’s advocate for the final for the final bit on these phones so as a maths teacher there is a wealth of apps out there that would really be handy if my kids had access to them so things like desmos for drawing graphs geogebra and so on and then you’ve alluded to a lot of the retrieval apps and flashcards quizlet and all these kind of stuff now i’m guessing the argument is that the benefit of having those available it is not outweighed by the potential downsides of the kids being distracted and so on and so forth is there an argument that for older kids so maybe you know six formers that they’ve got a place because that’s where actually from a math teacher’s perspective they really need access to these apps we schools don’t have the devices available and that’s at that stage they’re a bit older and a bit more responsible or still do you think the the costs outweigh the benefits so i do get that um i guess the two things i’d say is i’m not a math teacher and so i would hate to tell someone this is how you should teach because i don’t know um and i think everyone has to kind of make that judgment call based on their expertise um i have been in some really poor struggling communities where they schools simply can’t afford everyone have their own device we can control it and so therefore you do not to go okay but they all do have these super computers in their pocket maybe we should access them i think it’s certainly worth considering the big question to me is do you feel the gains outweigh the losses and if you feel that there’s no other way to teach students with how to do those graphs or to do this retrieval um and you feel that you can really manage the distractions you’ve got a real tight policy around that that’s i think for each school to decide uh i just think you have to go to really eyes wide open knowing what the potential losses learning losses are and for me i’m pretty convinced the losses outweigh the gains fantastic