Two New Rules, Two Teacher Workarounds

New guidance was supposed to help teachers make sense of screen time. New laws were supposed to keep phones out of the way. On This Week with EdSurge we look at what happens when teachers are left to make sense of rules that were never built with their classrooms in mind. Adam Stone talks with pre-K and kindergarten teachers about the guidance that excludes them, and civics teacher Dan Clark explains why he thinks Missouri got its phone ban wrong. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN The American Academy of Pediatrics updated its screen time guidance for the first time in a decade, but the update is scoped around children and adolescents and offers little direction for pre-K classrooms. Pre-K and kindergarten teachers are relying on tactile, low-tech strategies, such as forming letters out of Play-Doh, to reinforce face-to-face interaction instead of defaulting to screens. Missouri's new law bans any portable communication device on a student's person from the first bell to the last, which cut off students working on a community advocacy project from the platform they knew best how to use. We explore if blanket phone bans skip the harder work of teaching digital citizenship, comparing the debate to longstanding arguments over whether schools should still teach cursive. STORIES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Early Childhood Education Teachers Grapple with Screen Time by Adam Stone The Case Against the Classroom Cellphone Crackdown by Dan Clark STAY CONNECTED Subscribe to EdSurge newsletters at edsurge.com. Find the latest education news at edsurge.com/news. Follow EdSurge on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. HOST AND CONTRIBUTORS Host: Ira Apfel Featuring: Adam Stone, Education and Technology Journalist Dan Clark, Eighth Grade Civics Teacher, Missouri