Part 1: Cell Phones, Teaching, and Emotional Development

“Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development.”

― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Howdy, hard-working snackers! I bring you greetings from the snowy banks of the Chesapeake Bay.

Depending on where you teach, you know that snowfall is an occasion for great celebration by students and teachers alike. I can say with great confidence, however, that our students will spend much of their day looking at devices.

I noticed the "propaganda I'm not falling for" social media trend about a year ago, around the time I read Jonathan Haidt's book. Here goes...the propaganda I'm not falling for is teachers aren't responsible for the emotional development of their students. It's easy and tempting to assume that all the gaming, social media consumption, etc. most persistent classroom problem is distraction. I would argue, alongside Haidt, that the biggest challenge the phones and tablets present is that young brains are rapidly being rewired to not understand their emotional needs or those of others when they're in face-to-face environments.

In my middle school classroom, this often looks like kids who refuse to try the work because their peers have learned to be ready to attack one another's unscripted attempts at learning. Kids being mean isn't new, of course. What is new is widespread stunted emotional development that grows from fewer and fewer opportunities to practice healthy in-person cues and responses. When teachers ask questions in class, children can't respond with carefully-scripted, copiously edited video posts. If they give the wrong answer or aren't perceived to do it exactly right, the blowback from peers is swift and severe. Which is very interesting, because that conditioned response to be nasty online appears to easily transfer to the in-person world of our classrooms. On the other hand, if a child "fails" in a video game, 80 per cent of the time they will hit 'reset' and try again. I don't know about you, but I don't see that many kids bringing that level of resilience when presented with new material in my classes.

I don't think it's just about what kids think is fun and what isn't. That said, it doesn't help that many of them are spending more and more time scripting their own fast-paced online fun without input from adults at younger and younger ages. Humans get good at what they practice. We are teaching children how to act and react in positive ways when they're in our classes to be sure. Unfortunately, the remaining two-thirds of their typical days are affording fewer and fewer opportunities to build confidence, resilience, and healthy verbal responses to the growth processes of others.

What I'm doing differently in response is to allow students to make mistakes in front of one another in activities that are fun and not necessarily connected to the curriculum. My old-skool "brain breaks" are now at the beginning of class, front and center. Leading with in-person creative play helps coax them back to the way students learned positive emotional development before all the technology. This collaboration taught real-world collaborative problem-solving alongside empathy and resilience in ways sitting and watching a screen can't. Here's one I used last week. So-called soft skills (like playing that game and realizing that a clap is too hard and need to adjust without adults telling them) are gold in an increasingly online world.

If you're close by, enjoy the frozen fun and be safe. Everyone, slip, slide, and play with games that teach emotional development. And, as always...

Happy snacking!

Chef Charles

www.teacherssnacks.com