Tired of the Cell Phone in Class Battle? Try These Classroom-Tested Tips

One of our favorite colleagues once declared, “I DID NOT go to college to learn how to figure out if someone is texting in their pocket.”

No kidding.

When we brainstormed our most effective classroom management strategies for high school teachers, our initial outline included a discussion of the everpresent cell phone in class. Quickly, however, we realized that this issue deserves its own blog post.

Many classroom management issues arise at all grade levels—humans are humans, after all. But using a cell phone in class is, in some ways, a uniquely high school problem.

A Pew Research study in June 2024 found that 72% of high school teachers consider students’ use of a cell phone in class to be a major problem. (To be honest, this statistic initially caught our eye because we wanted to know more about the 28% of high school teachers who don’t consider it a problem. Who are you? Email us!)

A closer look revealed an interesting insight, however: that 72% is in contrast to only 33% of middle school teachers and 6% of elementary school teachers.

Upon reflection, this does make sense (no matter how ubiquitous phones feel to us high school teachers): many parents wait until their child is in high school to buy them a cell phone.

The study also found that 60% of high school teachers at schools with a cell phone policy find it “very/somewhat difficult” to enforce that policy. Not at all surprising.

People who don’t work in education might find the debate over using a cell phone in class confusing: What’s the big deal? Aren’t phones just part of life now? Why don’t you just tell students to put their phones away?

Those of us who battle against the cell phone in class every day, however, know it’s a unique challenge.

Why Is Using a Cell Phone in Class Such a Problem?

The biggest problem with students’ using their cell phone in class is the astronomical distraction the phone creates. 

It’s challenging to keep the attention of a roomful of teenagers under the best of circumstances. But now our students have a highly addictive device in their hands that has been intentionally designed to attract and hold their attention.

Sean Parker, one of the founders of Facebook, explained that in an active effort to “consume as much of [users’] time and conscious attention as possible,” developers created “a social-validation feedback loop” that rewards users with dopamine hits, or “exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” In the same interview, he said, “it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. . . . It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

God knows, indeed.

Even if we are the best, most engaging teachers in the world, we cannot compete with a little machine that has been wired to exploit our students’ brain chemistry. It’s shocking how many students look at us in confusion when we ask, exasperatedly, why they’re on their phone again, insisting, “I didn’t even realize I grabbed it.”

Our brains are also far worse at multitasking than we like to believe: when we (not just our students) insist upon doing multiple things at once, our performance drops due to what researchers call the “switch-cost effect.” Our brains have to reconfigure from one task to the next every time we switch focus, resulting in a slowdown in cognitive performance. One study at Carnegie Mellon University found that students who received text messages during a task performed 20% worse than students who didn’t.

In addition, when students have a cell phone in class, they have a camera-equipped device that makes both cheating and cyberbullying easier and farther reaching.

If you haven’t yet read Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book The Anxious Generation, add it to your list immediately. Haidt has spent years tracking data on the growth of the smartphone and its correlation with the rapid increase of mental health issues in teenagers and young adults, and it’s a heartbreaking and eyeopening read.

Why Outright Cell Phone Bans Can Be Challenging

In response to the research (and the level of disruption), some schools have outright banned cell phones.

But in our experience, implementing a cellphone ban has significant downsides.

Classroom instruction is increasingly digital.

There are times when we long for the days of broken copiers and students who need to borrow a pencil. But in an increasingly paperless world, our classrooms are moving more and more fully online. 

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, “Ninety-four percent of public schools report providing digital devices, such as laptops or tablets, to students who need them for the 2022–23 school year.” In Title 1 districts like ours, that means every student was issued their own device.

Students do their work on devices. Educational apps are part of daily instruction. Students need a device to complete their assignments, and unfortunately, we’d rather have the student who forgot their Chromebook complete the assignment on their phone than sit there unable to work.

Even worse, if a student can’t afford a laptop or tablet but has a cell phone (and is at a school that doesn’t provide students with devices), equity issues arise when students have no way but their cell phones to access the Internet to complete assignments.

Cell phones, especially smartphones, are expensive.

At the time of writing this, the latest version of the iPhone starts at $799.

No school (and certainly no teacher) wants to be held responsible for such an expensive piece of property.

At our school, we weren’t supposed to confiscate student cell phones because if it was stolen from our desk, we (or the school) could be held liable for the student’s lost property.

Most teachers we know cannot afford to pay $799 if a student’s cell phone is stolen from their desk, and this is a steep price to ask schools, known for not operating on insufficient funds, to pay.

Cell phone bans raise safety concerns.

Sadly, in a country where school shootings happen shockingly often, many parents want their students to have a cell phone on them at all times for safety purposes. And we can’t blame them.

Our society is cell phone-driven.

Because we live in a world where nearly everyone has a cell phone and nearly everything is done on a cell phone, the world no longer has the “phone-free” boundaries it used to. 

We don’t have enough fingers and toes between us to count the number of students who had to answer their cell phone in class because their parent was calling them. In many cases, this is probably unnecessary (or untrue), but many high school students do have family responsibilities that make neither the student nor the parent willing to remove the student’s access to a cell phone during the school day.

8 Strategies for Dealing with Students Using a Cell Phone in Class

Have compassion for your students.

As a society, we’ve placed an enormously addictive device in the hands of teenagers, whose prefrontal cortexes (key for impulse control) are the better part of a decade away from being fully developed. 

We’re just as vulnerable to the addictive power of a cell phone as our students are, and our attention spans are also suffering. As tempting as it is to lose it when our students pick up that phone again, it’s important to remember what our students are up against and how tough that fight can be even for us.

We absolutely need to provide our students with boundaries and enforce those boundaries, but also we need to recognize that they need help, training, and practice.

Set a good example.

While we are the adults in the room and thus not necessarily bound to the same rules as our students, it helps everyone when we’re not saying one thing and doing another.

Not only do teenagers need healthy behaviors modeled for them, but they are also sensitive to perceived injustice. Your students are much more likely to push back against your cell phone policy when they see you constantly on your phone.

Of course, sometimes this is unavoidable, but it’s a good goal to keep in mind.

Tell students when phones are and are not allowed.

This is definitely an issue where clear and repeated communication is necessary. Whether you make an announcement or have a visual cue (our school gave us reversible “phones okay” / “phones not okay” signs), your students need to be explicitly told what the expectations are.

If you’re a “no phones at all” teacher, consider taking a few minutes at the beginning of class to put your phones away together. Should you have to remind your students every day? Of course not, but being proactive tends to be less painful than constantly reacting.

If you’re open to students using their cell phones at times, be aware that you’ll likely have to remind them more frequently to put their phones away.

Tell students where you expect phones to be when they are not in use.

Many people recommend having students put phones in backpacks so they’re not tempted to touch them. Research shows that merely the presence of a phone can be a distraction and decrease cognitive performance. 

Practically, however, Steph often found it more helpful to require students to put their phones face down in the corner of their desks where she could see them. When you tell students to put phones away, the cell phones often end up in laps or sweatshirt pockets for surreptitious use. It’s much easier to monitor phone use when you can see the phone, especially during a test when you’re monitoring for cheating.

We definitely recommend requiring earphones or AirPods to be put away, however (and sweatshirt hoods down). If a student is wearing one or both AirPods, it’s way too easy for them to hit play on even a cell phone that has been put away. Your students don’t need videos playing in one ear while you’re talking into the other.

Keep students busy.

It’s often easier to be proactive than reactive when it comes to classroom management, and as a general rule, we’ve found that not giving students time to be disruptive can be incredibly helpful. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to cell phones. Many of us grab our cell phones the second we have to wait for something, so not giving our students the chance to get bored can help limit unwanted use of the cell phone in class.

This might mean structuring your class period as a series of short activities, splitting long lectures up over multiple class periods, or directing students to a specific task if they finish their work early.

As a general rule, rely on gentle reminders.

Most of the time, we recommend a gentle “Please put that away” approach.

Phones are inevitably a distraction, but if you’re determined to assign detention to every student who uses a cell phone in class, it will quickly become your full-time job, you’ll find yourself arguing with students who have to respond to their mom, and you’re probably going to lose your mind.

Sometimes, however, consequences are needed.

Some students just can’t stay off their phones, and when they continue to disregard your gentle reminders, more consequences are necessary.

If your school has a cell phone policy, we recommend following that, but if you’re setting a policy for your own classroom, we recommend relying on the same progressive discipline plan you use for other classroom management issues.

Whether students lose a participation point, receive an email home or detention after X number of violations, or have their phone taken away (more on that below), make sure you’re consistent about when enough is enough. If you lose it one day and assign detentions even though you normally just tell students to put their phones away, it’s not fair to them (though it is completely understandable!).

Avoid taking phones away if you don’t have a secure place to put them.

Again, follow your school policy, but we do not recommend taking away students’ phones unless you have a secure place to put them. Given how expensive phones can be, it’s not worth the risk of putting it in your desk and having another student steal it (this is why we’re not super into wall-hanging phone holders—it’s too easy for someone to walk away with a phone that’s not theirs).

There is, however, an increasing market for locked phone storage solutions. Kate had a storage locker like this one that she would put phones in for the class period if students couldn’t control themselves. (Hers, however, was bright pink—easy to spot if it disappeared down the hall.) Researching this post, we also found some phone lockers where students can store and lock their phones for a full class period like this one, this one, and this one.

Unfortunately, cell phones are here to stay, which means dealing with students who use their cell phone in class is going to remain a part of our jobs. Whatever approach you take to handle the issue in your class, the most important things to keep in mind are clear expectations and consistency. And maybe a tiny bit of pity for these poor teenagers who have more power in their pockets than they know what to do with.

How do you handle cell phone issues in your classroom? We’d love to hear if you’ve got a go-to strategy we haven’t considered. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram @threeheads.works. If you’d like to receive encouraging emails and teaching tips in your inbox every Monday, we recommend joining our email list here (which will also give you access to our Free Resource Library).