Disrupted Classrooms: Can We Reclaim Kids with “Tik-Tok Brain” to Focus on Learning?

Schools and classrooms have changed after successive years of educational disruptions, shutdowns, home schooling isolation, and massive experiments in remote teaching. Serious gaps in student learning, psycho-social impacts, and academic achievement setbacks are now more visible from province-to-province in Canadian K-12 education. What’s less recognized and largely unaddressed is the profound impact of students’ near-total fixation with cellphones and complete absorption in cyberworlds.

Reading, in particular, is severely compromised in revved-up multi-task environments. Today’s elementary and secondary school students are essentially immersed in distractions. It’s next-to-impossible to learn or read with comprehension while keeping one eye on a phone, scrolling for videos, and being constantly interrupted, while attempting to pay attention to your teachers.

Promoters of ed tech have sold classroom teachers, parents and policy-makers a bill of goods.  Today’s students may be far more adept at accessing and using tech toys, but they have been profoundly affected by total immersion in constant connectivity, texting, and time-absorbing social media best exemplified by the incursion of Tik-Tok. Multi-tasking has been normalized and it comes with serious side-effects impairing students’ abilities to concentrate with adverse consequences for teaching kids to read.

Multi-tasking is being exposed as a myth. New evidence-based research is emerging which connects the proliferation of advanced cellphones with distractibility in workplaces and schools contributing to more frequent errors, higher levels of stress, reduced cognitive ability, and lower productivity. Focusing exclusively on banning or limiting cellphones sparks much debate, but it often misses the point.  Teachers are now facing an up-hill battle to reclaim the attention of the pandemic generation of students.

Identifying the impact of mobile phones and social media is not new, as Teach Like a Champion founder Doug Lemov recently reminded us. American research generated by  Jean M. Twenge and others found that teenagers’ media use roughly doubled between 2006 and 2016 across gender, race, and class. In competition against the smartphone, the book, the idea of reading, lost significant ground. By 2016, just 16 percent of 12th-grade students read a book or magazine daily. As recently as 1995, 41 percent did. Meanwhile, social media was on the rise. By 2016, about three-quarters of teenagers reported using social media almost every day

The onslaught completely transformed teen culture with some detrimental side-effects.  Some 47 % of teenagers use the phone whilst on the toilet, double that of adults. Students who perform a task just in sight of their phone (regardless of if they are using it) do about 20% worse as it still distracts them. In addition, students who are on their phone more in class get worse grades, regardless of gender or previous grade average. Some 60 % of male and female U.S, college students, surveyed in long before the pandemic, reported feeling very agitated when they could not access their mobile phone.

The Pandemic has only made matters worse. When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, virtually everything that might have been competed without smartphones suddenly disappeared. A recent Common Sense Media study found that children’s daily entertainment usage of screens grew by 17 percent between 2019 and 2021—more than it had grown during the four previous years. Overall, daily entertainment screen use in 2021 increased to 5.5 hours among tweens ages 8 to 12 and to more than 8.3 hours among teens ages 13 to 18, on average. These trends were even more pronounced for students from low-income families, whose parents were most likely to have to work in person and have fewer resources to spend on alternatives to screens.

Leading researchers like Twenge sounded early warnings that excessive smartphone use would likely have catastrophic consequences for teens’ well-being, and those seemingly alarmist warnings have been borne out in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Teenagers’ reported mental health concerns have spiked with only 47 percent of students reported feeling connected to the adults and peers in their schools. Some 44 percent of high-school students reported feeling sad or persistently hopeless in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

School disruptions and closures had a big effect.  Students who said they felt “connected to adults and peers” at school were almost 60 percent less likely to report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness than those who did not—some 35 percent of connected students felt that way, compared with 55 percent who did not feel connected to school. The socio-emotional distress students are experiencing, according to Lemov, is as much a product of the so-called ‘cellphone epidemic’ as it is a product of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The explosion of Tik-Tok fad is not only a prime example of the pervasive impact of mobile phone culture, but demonstrates how today’s kids can get hooked on continuous social media feeds. Peering inside the “Tik-Tok Brain,” neuroscientists have shown that “the dopamine rush of endless short videos” makes it hard for young viewers to switch their focus to slower-moving, teacher-guided activities. “We’ve made kids live in a candy store,” is how it was described a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal.

Screen time is crowding out teaching and learning, most notable in declining reading proficiency. Spending so much time on mobile phones, even without social media, adversely affects attention and concentration skills, making it harder to focus fully on any task and to maintain that focus. When students are simply unable to focus or pay attention, learning to read through systematic literacy programs or tackling more rigorous academic tasks in higher grades becomes doubly difficult for teachers in today’s classrooms.

Banning or severely restricting cellphones in class is more of a quick fix when the problem is far wider in societal culture and runs much deeper in schools.  “If you want kids to pay attention,” Cincinnati pediatrician and literacy specialist John S. Hutton advises us, then students “need to practice paying attention.” Turning the phones off is wise, but only the beginning in the post-pandemic struggle to foster what Teach Like a Champion calls “habits of attention” and to reclaim today’s students.

How have successive disrupted school years made reaching today’s students a bigger problem for classroom teachers?  How much of the change is the result of remote learning and the further proliferation and dominance of mobile devices?  How can today’s teachers compete with “Tik-Tok Brian” to reclaim students?  Why is curtailing cellphone use, by itself, unlikely to make much of a difference?

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Summer School in Pandemic Times: How Effective are the Programs in Closing the Learning Gaps?

Summer school is no longer just a make-up exercise for high school students short a few credit courses or looking to raise their final grade averages. Over the past two years, it’s gradually been expanded in Ontario and elsewhere into the elementary grades. Students as young as 6 years of age and up to age 13 have been enrolled in “summer school programs” aimed ostensibly at closing the learning gaps from Grades 1 to 8 identified since March 2020 as a result of some 22 to 27 weeks of school closures and disrupted learning.

Studies originating in the United States, Britain and the European Union have alerted us to the damage inflicted in terms of learning loss as well as psycho-social after-affects, especially for those already struggling in school or from marginalized communities.  A University of Alberta study conducted by Dr. George Georgiou found that students in Grades 1 and 2 in the Edmonton area performed, on average, eight months to a full year below grade level on reading tasks by the end of the 2020-21 academic year. Similarly, Grade 6 student assessment results in 2021-22 in Nova Scotia, for example, showed fewer students met expectations in reading, writing and math compared with pre-pandemic assessments.

A recent feature focusing on elementary summer school in the Ontario Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB), produced by The Globe and Mail’s education reporter, Caroline Alphonso, generated some hope. Based upon Grade 1 to 3 summer school classes at Wilfrid Jury Public School in the City of London, Ontario, she saw first hand evidence that younger students were gaining in basic skills and confidence through exercises focused early reading, writing and mathematics.

Summer school programs in the TVDSB were targeted where they were most needed and would do the most good. Teachers, according to Superintendent Marion Moynihan, connected with families of students who were working at a Level 2 or lower (below provincial standards) and invited them to enroll their children in the program. It was explicitly designed to focus on literacy and numeracy and to counter the effect of the typical 9-week-long summer slide in learning.  

Students in Grades 1 to 3, from province-to-province, have only experienced school during times of pandemic disruption. Three-to-four-week programs may be short, but they are beginning to address the learning shortfalls. Rather than attempting to work miracles, Grade 1 teacher Erica Payne was realistic in her expectations. School readiness for September 2022 was the overriding priority, but little-by-little the gaps were being closed in those critical early grades.

So far, so good, but not every elementary school summer program, it appears, fit that description. Most such programs fly below the radar, but one offered by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) attracted considerable attention because it tacked completely in another direction. Judging from the Twitter posts of Vanessa Lau, a TDSB LO teacher, the Grade 3 program at Lynnwood Heights Public School, offered “a wonderful 4 weeks of creativity, problem-solving and learning.”

Parents at this TDSB expecting a ‘catch-up’ program in reading, mathematics and science likely got a surprise.  What their children experienced in this TDSB-funded Continuing Education program was a shortened version of the usual pre-pandemic curriculum with considerable emphasis on equity and anti-racism.

Novice teachers like Ms. Lau tend to reflect prevailing education school trends and are often eager to please program supervisors and board consultants. That may explain the program philosophy and pedagogy. In this case, the Grade 3 program began with a lesson on skin colour and where it comes from, and included activities designed to raise awareness of racism and promote social justice. It did, in fairness, also include a rather ingenious and ambitious STEM project where students were expected to design a playground and at least two structures.

Critics on social media seized on Vanessa Lau’s regular Twitter posts and saw her little elementary school program as another example of “woke education” promulgated by the TDSB. While that’s an unfair characterization, and one devaluing her professional choices, the Lynnwood PS program was out-of-sync with broader provincial policy designed to close fundamental knowledge and skill gaps and get pandemic generation children back-on-track.

Pandemic learning recovery programs are finally beginning to surface.  In late July 2022, Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced the Plan to Catch Up. Schools will stay open in 2022-23, if at all possible. The plan not only includes a return to in-person learning, but a commitment to restoring extracurricular activities like sports and field trips. It aligns with previously-announced plans for a large-scale tutoring program, enhanced summer learning, and improved mental health supports for students who are returning to classrooms.

Revamping summer school is a relatively small piece of the overall provincial strategy. While the most vocal leaders of Ontario teacher unions are skeptical of anything coming out of the Ontario PC government of Doug Ford, regional superintendents and researchers specializing in education research and child mental health are reasonably supportive of a broad educational recovery plan.

Lakehead Public Schools director of education Ian MacRae is fairly typical of the general response. “It’s not something new. It’s what we have been suggesting all the way through COVID, that it’s extremely important that kids get back in the classroom, and that supports are in place to provide students with the best opportunities to be successful once they do return to normal learning situations.”

Why did it take so long to prepare and implement Summer School programs for elementary school students adversely affected by pandemic learning loss? What is accomplished if such programs eschew intensive instruction in literacy and numeracy and default to pre-pandemic ‘student well-being’ and ‘social justice’ programs?  Will the emerging learning recovery programs be equal to the challenge?

 

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