Teacher Tina Somers prepares her classroom for her grade 8-9 English Language Arts students at John D Bracco School in Edmonton, Alta. Ms. Somers has seen firsthand the positive difference a cellphone ban can have on students.Amber Bracken /The Globe and Mail
Before last fall, when cellphones weren’t yet officially banned during classes in Orly Kaye’s Toronto high school, the students’ glowing screens were ubiquitous. They scrolled TikTok and Instagram Reels, made lunch plans via group chats, played games or watched YouTube videos. Some kids, the 16-year-old says, wouldn’t even turn down the volume or use earbuds. The refrain of “put your phones away, please” from desperate teachers was near-constant, and mostly ignored.
Orly wasn’t immune to their phone’s pull either. When they’d get bored during science class, they’d start scrolling. “I’d be half paying attention to class, and half paying attention to Pinterest and drawing,” says Orly, who is going into grade 12.
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Last September, the Ontario government introduced new measures banning or limiting cellphone use in classrooms. In the province, students in grades 7 to 12 were not permitted to use cellphones during class time, unless explicitly allowed by the teacher. Students in kindergarten to grade 6 were required to keep phones out of sight for the entire school day.
Similar restrictions dictating where and when students are allowed to use their phones have gone into effect in every other province.
Orly says the ban has helped some, but that the biggest change in their school has been how students creatively continue to use their devices. “The amount of phone usage I saw maybe decreased a little bit. But, for the most part, people just found ways to be sneaky about it.”
A sign warns students of a cellphone ban at John D Bracco School.Amber Bracken /The Globe and Mail
Students prop up their phones behind laptop screens or tuck them away in laps. VPNs can be installed to circumvent the firewall blocking social media sites on the school WiFi. Some use their phones as a hotspot to access those forbidden websites on their laptops.
“For students, I think we’re aware our phones are bad for us and we’re obviously not supposed to have them in class. But people don’t care,” says Orly. “It’s the social norm.”
Across the country, the results of the new rules have been mixed. Some teachers say it’s been a game-changer in the classroom, with students less distracted, more social and more engaged.
Others say they’re still in a losing battle against screens, pointing to inconsistencies in how the ban is imposed classroom to classroom, and saying teachers lack support from administrators to enforce the rules.
This generation of students is the first to be born into a world already dominated by smart phones and social media – experiencing fully all the perks and messiness that come with being so entwined with technology. How use of the devices during their formative school years will shape them is unknown, but the potential harms have educators calling for a more unified approach – and some even suing tech companies for the problem they created.
Toronto student Orly Kaye said restrictions on cell phone use in the classroom have helped somewhat, but students find creative ways to get around them.Andres Valenzuela/The Globe and Mail
Six years ago, before the new provincial rules came into effect across Canada, the principal at Tina Somers’s school decided to ban phones in the classroom. At first, Ms. Somers, who teaches English language arts to grades 7, 8 and 9 in Edmonton, wasn’t entirely sold on the idea. She’d seen some positives of phones in the classroom – students could quickly look up the spelling or definition of a word, for instance – and she felt it was more important to teach them to use technology responsibly than to restrict it.
Then, she saw the ban in action. “Honestly, I could not believe the shift in engagement. You’re seeing faces rather than tops of heads,” she says. “Since then, regardless of which school I was at, I had a no-phone policy in my classroom.”
Ms. Somers said some students appreciate the cellphone restrictions.Amber Bracken /The Globe and Mail
Without phones as an easy escape hatch for bored students, Ms. Somers says they were forced to pay attention and participate in discussions.
Research backs up Ms. Somers’ experience. A 2023 UNESCO report found a negative link between excessive cellphone use and academic performance, with students taking up to 20 minutes to refocus on what they were learning after getting distracted by their phone, an alarming amount of time considering most classes are less than an hour long.
Ms. Somers says when she has honest conversations with students about phone use in class, even they will admit they appreciate the rules.
As to the success of the ban schoolwide, she credits the school’s administration for laying out clear policies around discipline – and backing up teachers when it comes to enforcement.
“If you don’t have the support of your admin, you’re dead in the water,” she says.
Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, says teachers in the province consider cellphone bans effective overall. Last January, the association surveyed its members and found 74 per cent agreed that they reduced disruptions, while 66 per cent said they believed the bans improved students’ mental well-being. But the survey also found that one of the main issues teachers faced was inconsistency around the policies’ implementation and enforcement.
Some schools and boards would tell students to store cellphones in their lockers, while others said to keep them in their backpacks. Some schools told students they couldn’t bring them to school at all.
The consequences for breaking the rules also varied: Sometimes phones could be taken away, while other times parents would be called and some broken rules could even lead to expulsion.
“When I talk to my colleagues, they like that the phones aren’t as big of a distraction in their classrooms,” says Mr. Schilling. “Now it’s about making sure that everyone understands the policy and that parents, school boards and administrators have the teacher’s back when they’re trying to enforce these rules.”
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Judy Sommer, who teaches grade 12 social science classes with the York Region District School Board, agrees that consistency on a schoolwide or board-wide basis is critical to the effectiveness of the ban. At her school, individual teachers get to decide how to implement the rules, meaning expectations are different classroom to classroom.
In practice, the uneven approach often produces a familiar scene.
“You can walk through the halls of a high school and peek into the doors of different classrooms, and most of the time you will see a significant portion of the students in that classroom on their phones,” says Ms. Sommer.
She tries to keep phones in check in her own classes, but she worries about the lack of buy-in from the kids themselves. “There does have to be a certain amount of accountability coming from the students,” she says. “Many of them are going off to postsecondary, and nobody’s going to be telling them to put their phones away.”
Jeff Maharaj, the president of the Ontario Principals’ Council, says he hasn’t heard concerns from teachers about inconsistencies in enforcing the rules, but that when problems do emerge, teachers and administrators need to work together on a solution.
“It’s important that, as a school, there’s communication between the teacher and administrators as to what the expectations are and what steps that they should follow if there are issues in the classroom.”
Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Even when bans in school are effectively enforced, the negative effects of phone use can creep into the classroom.
Ryan Wettlaufer, a grade 7 and 8 teacher with the Waterloo Region District School Board, says that at his school, the majority of students follow the rules, keeping their phones in their lockers all day.
But that doesn’t mean his school isn’t immune to issues that can arise between classmates on social media.
“We know there’s all sorts of negative interactions happening outside of school that often make their way into the school, like problems related to group texts and Instagram DMs,” says Mr. Wettlaufer.
However, with up to 33 students in his class at once, there just isn’t always the necessary time to fully address the issues that arise from these online interactions.
A high school student waits to be picked up at Oakwood Collegiate Institute in Toronto, 2020.Tyler Anderson/The Globe and Mail
“We see the effects of it. We see dysregulated students, upset students, but to drill down to like, ‘What is actually causing it?’ – it’s difficult and it takes a lot of time because people don’t just come out and share the whole story.”
For Mr. Wettlaufer, the bans felt like a toothless political announcement. “We were already dealing with these things at a school level and it’s not like there were additional supports that came related to it. It was an edict that everyone was left to figure out on their own, and that’s what we’re already doing.”
The fact that teachers are on the front lines of dealing with the fallout of students’ social-media use has prompted some Canadian school boards to take legal action.
Around the same time many of the phone bans went into effect, several of the largest school boards in Ontario sued the corporations behind Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, accusing them of designing addictive products that disrupt learning and harm the mental health of students. None of the allegations have been proven in court.
Around 500 similar lawsuits have been filed in the United States by individual states and school districts.
“If we need more mental health counsellors because of a growing addiction problem associated with social media, the resources simply aren’t there at the school level without compensation from the parties who are putting them to that additional cost,” says Duncan Embury, the lawyer representing the school boards.
In March, the Ontario Superior Court dismissed a motion by the tech companies to throw out the lawsuit. The Divisional Court of Ontario is considering the companies’ motion seeking leave to appeal the previous court’s decision and will later decide whether the case can move forward.
Orly, about to start grade 12, said it can be hard to resist the pull of their smartphone in class.Andres Valenzuela/The Globe and Mail
In Canada, some schools are taking initiative to find more foolproof ways to curb phone use, requiring students to put their devices into lockable fabric pouches. The sacks can only be unlocked during specific times, such as during lunch or at the end of day. (Savvy kids in New York, where the pouches are more prevalent, quickly figured out how to bust open the magnetic seal or stuffed them with burner phones.)
Orly, the 16-year-old Toronto student, believes that a more drastic measure like this – putting phones in a central location from the beginning of the day until the last bell rings – might be the only way for the policy to actually work.
“I think for the phone ban to be as effective as they want, and it hurts me to say this, but if you’re looking for a cultural change, that’s probably the step you have to take.”