Upper School Students Experience School Life Without Phones

What would it feel like to be without your phone for an entire day? Upper School students have been discovering that feeling all week during Phone-Free Week.

“Last spring we put together a committee made up of students, faculty, and staff to look at cell phones and our cell phone policy,” said Assistant Head of Upper School for Community Tyler Hale. “Part of the problem—or opportunity—was this body of emerging research about the impact of cell phones from the surgeon general and several prominent authors, one of which was Jonathan Haight (author of The Anxious Generation). And it was really concerning. So we wanted to revisit our cell phone policy and make sure it was matching the science that was out. But we wanted to do it thoughtfully and slowly in a way that included students, faculty, and staff,” said Hale.

The committee decided to experiment with a week without cell phones. The students were asked to set down their phones in a designated “parking area” at the start of the day, and not pick them up again until their classes were done for the day. This way, the students could gain a fresh perspective.

“I gave the example to students of a frog in its life cycle,” said Hale. “It doesn’t know it’s in a pond until it reaches a certain stage and can crawl out of the pond onto the bank and look back at the pond. Right now, this week, cell phone free week is our chance to stand outside of the pond and look at our community and say, what impact did cell phones have, in a way where we’re not trying to do that while cell phones are actively impacting our community.”

To prepare the students, Hale put together some questions for them to consider, including what they thought they might gain personally from the experience and what the community might gain, and what would be the hardest part for them personally, to be without their phones.

Students said they thought they might get a chance to have more quality time with friends, work on homework, and be more in the moment. They said the negative impacts might be to feel disconnected from society and to feel anxious without their phones.

Feedback that came through this week indicated that students have felt most inconvenienced by not being able to see their class schedules on their phones and not being able to refer to their phones to see what time it is. They aren’t used to looking at wall clocks to see the time. This week, they’ve noticed the clocks more, as well as the school bells.

A positive effect Hale and other school leaders have seen is the absence of scrolling.

“I’ve seen students spend their entire free block scrolling or gaming on their phones,” said Hale. Some students did switch over to their laptops at the start of the week, but Hale said he noticed that went down as the week progressed. And he has seen more students talking to each other.

“We’ve had a policy for a long time of no phones in the classroom. But then, as soon as class gets out, every single student grabs their phone and spends the next 10 steps checking their notifications. That stops the hallway talk. But this week, the passing periods have been dramatically different.” 

“Some students have also told me, ’I kind of like it, but don’t tell anyone!,’ almost as if they are embarrassed to say they like being phone free,” added Hale.

Like any experiment, Hale said, the next step is to analyze the results. “The focus of this experiment is not to say, we’re now going to write a policy that says no phones in Upper School,” said Hale. “It really is an experiment, to gather data, and now we’re going to review the data as a group and hopefully make a recommendation on the next step.”

To learn more about this topic, consider joining OES Parent Partnership on October 8 for a joint Middle and Upper School meeting to discuss The Anxious Generation, by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The book explores how children have been impacted by technology, from sleep deprivation and attention fragmentation, to social comparison and loneliness, and how parents can take steps to help their children be more healthy. RSVP here if you’d like to attend the discussion. You don’t need to have read the book to attend.