Social media use is now rampant among kids and teens and registering as a worsening public health problem. A recent New Brunswick Health Council Student Wellness Survey, covering 2022-2023, delivered the shocker. Three in five youths (61.5%) reported that they spent 3 or more hours a day on social media sites or apps, up from 47.7 % the year before. Some 14 % of kids and teens spend 7 hours or more per day on social media. Simply put, students spend far more time on social media than they do in school.
Mobile phones have also taken over today’s classrooms and are now described by overwhelmed teachers as “tiny boxes of kryptonite.” Some 97% of the time students are using their phones for non-educational purposes, according to the latest survey conducted by American expert Dr. Jean Twenge and her California research institute Common Sense Media. The data shows that 30.2% of the school day is spent on social media; 25.7% on You Tube; 17.3% on gaming; 5.4% streaming video; leaving only 1.4 % for strictly educational purposes.
Successive years of educational disruptions, shutdowns, home isolation, and massive experiments in remote teaching have radically altered the terms of engagement. Most teachers and a good many parents are trying to reach a whole generation of kids hooked on cellphones and exhibiting all the signs of a new clinical condition – TikTok Brain.
While education leaders and school systems are struggling to cope with student learning loss, psycho-social impacts, and stagnating academic achievement, we are facing a new challenge — the profound impact of students’ near-total fixation with cellphones and complete absorption in cyberworlds.
The recent explosion of TikTok was not only a prime example of the pervasive impact of mobile phone culture, but demonstrated how today’s kids can get hooked on continuous social media feeds. Peering inside the “TikTok 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.
Noisy Classrooms and Shrinking Attention Spans
Students fidgeting, sneaking a peek at smartphones, chatting with one another and disrupting others — all contributes to making today’s classrooms unsettling places. Yet excessive classroom noise and disruptions remain mostly undiagnosed and understudied in Canadian kindergarten-to-grade-12 education. Now, research evidence is accumulating testifying to the fact that that this background noise is interfering with student learning and achievement.
One in five 15-year-old Canadian students reported to the OECD in the spring of 2018 that learning time was lost to noise, distractions and disorder — so much so that they detracted from learning in class. This problem worsened from 2015 to 2020 and, we now know, especially since the pandemic school disruption.
Proliferation of cellphones in schools has only compounded the problem. 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 TikTok.
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. 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. The proliferation of advanced cellphones has contributed to distractibility in workplaces and schools contributing to more frequent errors, higher levels of stress, reduced cognitive ability, and lower productivity.
Teachers are now facing an up-hill battle to reclaim the attention of the pandemic generation of students. It is now abundantly clear, as American education researcher Doug Lemov pointed out in the Fall 2022 edition of Education Next, the socio-emotional distress students are experiencing is as much a product of the so-called ‘cellphone epidemic’ as it is a product of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recapturing Student Attention
Screen time is crowding out opportunities for teaching and learning outside and inside of classrooms. 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. That may explain why Quebec is in the process of banning cellphones in school, following similar moves in France, the Netherlands, Australia and nine American states.
Banning or severely restricting cellphones in class is simply 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 John S. Hutton claims, then students “need to practice paying attention.”
Turning the phones off in classrooms is wise, but only the beginning in the post-pandemic struggle to foster what Teach Like a Champion author Lemov calls “habits of attention” and to win back the minds of today’s students.
Today’s classroom teachers cannot compete in a revved-up world driven by mobile electronic devices and steady streams of flickering videos. In a world where teens are ‘driven to distraction,’ truly getting at the root of the problem will involve what UK student behaviour advisor Tom Bennett OBE aptly terms “creating a culture” and changing fundamentally the terms of engagement in the classroom.
Creating a culture of mutual respect and purposeful learning free of constant and unrelenting disruptions will not come easily. What we require is a complete change in pedagogical approach with a renewed focus on ‘teaching-centred learning.’ It will also take a whole new set of student behaviour guidelines geared to building more positive, consistent, and calmer learning environments.
*An earlier version of this commentary appeared in The Telegraph-Journal, November 1, 2023.
Why have mobile phones and social media come to dominate the lives of teens and captured their minds? Has it reached the point where “TikTok Brain” is a clinical condition? What is the connection between rampant social media use and the increased prevalence of reported anxiety and depression among kids and youth? Is banning cellphones in schools and classrooms sustainable? How feasible is it to address the problem with a whole-of-school plan to “create a culture” more conducive to calmer, more mutually-respectful and productive classrooms?
Educhatter 