In “End the phone-based childhood now,” Haidt carefully traces the decline of play and independence (and its relationship to increased risk aversion and anxiety), the rise of smartphones (and the harms of 24/7 access to an under-regulated digital world on brain development), and the dark side of techno-optimism (that laid the foundation for a whole generation to get swept up in new tools that had few guardrails in place). 

His piece masterfully weaves together a host of data points demonstrating how, in the course of a single decade, childhood and adolescence were “rewired” to be “more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.” The shift was seismic. “Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board,” Haidt writes. “Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected.”

Haidt concludes his manifesto with four simple (although not necessarily easy) steps to correcting course: (1) no smartphones before high school, (2) no social media before 16, (3) no phones in schools, and (4) more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. 

His recommendations are directed at society as a whole. But they belie an inconvenient truth that education systems must face head-on: schools are inextricably linked to the good, bad, and ugly of what’s happening in the consumer market. Schools may not be responsible for the dumpster fire that phones and social media have ignited, but they are also one of the few institutions–besides the highly decentralized institution of the “family”–with the power to protect and enrich young people’s social lives and healthy development. 

Banning phones in schools could help. But based on my own research, here are three things that education policymakers, systems leaders, and edtech providers will need to wrestle with if they want to take Haidt’s recommendations seriously:

Advocate for Business Models and Policies that Promote Prosocial Behavior

One of the ironies of the devastating disconnection that phones and social media have produced is that these tools, at their inception, were breakthroughs in scaling connection itself. 

Used properly, dreaded screen time can morph into precious face time, connecting us across time zones, expanding the reach of our networks, and affording us more frequent and low-cost conversations with loved ones and colleagues around the world. 

Those very affordances could make the four walls of schools radically more permeable: Imagine a classroom where, at the press of a button, middle schoolers could talk to an actual scientist about a project they’re working on, or high schoolers could hear about a wide range of college and career experiences from alumni of their school. These are not just possible, but incredibly affordable, with modern technology. 

But until we reckon with an acute lack of incentives and policies to build positive social connection, banning phones is likely the safest route. Because if the past twenty years of social media have taught us one thing, it’s that we have a startling dearth of business models and policies to support tech that promotes prosocial behavior. Social media platforms make money on engagement, and even more money on addiction. There are few business incentives to encourage young people to build positive connections online, much less to spend more of their time deepening and diversifying connections offline.

Edtech markets aren’t causing the ills that Haidt outlines, but they also aren’t immune to some of the same shortcomings. In fact, edtech tools rarely promote prosocial behavior or foster new connections. At the root of this is the fact that schools today aren’t demanding solutions that deepen connection–if anything, the edtech market has evolved around clear demand for efficiency innovations that require less cost-intensive human interaction, not more.

The answer? Education policies–both local and state and federal–must start to name and put dollars towards positive social connection as an outcome in its own right. That’s the only way that the incentives inside of school systems will start to better align to the broader need to reorient how technology gets used beyond school. More importantly, we could start to see technology get used in service of helping students develop more positive connections, both online and off.

Build Family Engagement to Buoy Collective Action

Schools and families are going to have to work together when it comes to a hard reset on tech use and social media. That won’t be easy.

As Haidt points out, part of what’s driven troubling rates of tech addiction and ensuing isolation has less to do with technology and more to do with a collective action problem: parents, schools, and policymakers struggle to define, agree upon, and deliver on what’s “good” for children.

New models of family engagement will need to emerge to make a dent in–and effectively enforce–more responsible tech policies. My colleague Mahnaz Charania’s research on family engagement spotlighted emerging innovations that could rewrite and deepen the family-school compact. Part of this has to do with building family engagement models anchored in two-way trust, rather than one-way communication from schools to parents. Perhaps even more powerful are models that connect families to one another, moving away from the typical hub-and-spoke paradigm of school-to-family to a networked model whereby schools and families support one another in more dynamic and responsive ways.

This, likewise, probably needs to start with policy change: if we have any hope of erecting tech guardrails that stick, I suspect that education systems will need to see family engagement as more of an essential and less of a nice-to-have. 

Build Real-World Experiences in the Age of AI

There’s another article that should lend urgency to getting this right. It’s a memo from the $35 billion dollar venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz called “It’s not a computer, it’s a companion!” It came out last summer and hasn’t made the rounds in my education or parenting circles. But it needs to.

It’s a road map to a dystopian future where AI companions “live among us”, where AI boyfriends and girlfriends are touted as ‘better than’ the real thing, and where Silicon Valley cashes out on the very same vulnerabilities that social media has exploited. 

Read alongside Haidt’s piece, the memo should make your blood boil. Nowhere does the word loneliness appear despite being the bedrock and fuel for this emerging market of AI companions. 

AI evangelists will rightfully argue that some of these so-called companions can dramatically improve our lives, offering a welcome alternative to cost-intensive supports like tutoring, coaching, and guidance that young people desperately need and too often don’t get.

While those use cases merit enthusiasm, we need to proceed with immense caution. In the coming years, we will be walking a tightrope between innovations that help make humans more productive and innovations that irreparably harm their social connectedness. Young people are especially vulnerable. As John Bailey has warned, “Kids will want the affirming relationships that they can have with their AI system. That sounds like science fiction until you experience the technology.” 

It would be one thing if we didn’t have two decades of data showing us all of the detrimental effects that “social” consumer technologies can have on development. But, as Haidt’s piece illustrates, we do. And still, we have glib investors about to make a ton of money selling simulated connections that promise to lure us, and our children, online. 

Remember how schools have to absorb the costs of consumer technologies? Without a commitment to safeguarding childhood in all the ways Haidt outlines, the rapid rise of AI companions stands to further erode young people’s access to and ability to be in real human relationships by peddling frictionless alternatives. 

This is where Haidt’s fourth recommendation, that young people must be drawn back into the real world, is something schools can and should take seriously. Regulation alone can’t and won’t stop investors from capitalizing on our loneliness and the particular vulnerabilities of young people’s still-developing brains. We also have to play offense. We have to find ways to outcompete AI companionship. “Real world learning”–a darling of some education reformers, but still a distant notion in many traditional schools–should be resourced and prioritized at new heights, not just as a powerful learning tool, but as one that centers human connection as a vital component of healthy youth development.  

The picture these two articles paint is not a pretty one: but it’s one where schools must play an even larger leadership role. By prioritizing prosocial behavior, investing in deeper family engagement, and leaning into the power of real-world learning, schools can help today’s young people reclaim their childhood–and lessen the likelihood that AI companions steal the next generation’s.

The post Beyond Bans: Schools’ Role in a Hard Reset on the ‘Phone-Based Childhood’ appeared first on Getting Smart.

Back to school means back to building relationships. Across high school campuses this fall, the first weeks of class will be marked by new rosters, ice breakers, hopes and dreams conferences, and the like as teachers set out to get to know their students and to help students get to know one another.

But before schools set to work on building new relationships, they should also pay attention to the relationships their students do and don’t already have. New data suggests that this year, the social landscape for some high school students looks different than years prior. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, one-third of adolescents reported that they feel less close to their classmates and teachers than they did before COVID. About a quarter felt less close to their friends or extended family as well. That should be alarming to school leaders, as young people tend to be more comfortable turning to people they already know for support. Smaller networks, in other words, likely spell less support.

The Pew data is not all doom and gloom. About half of teens reported a sense of social stability, feeling that their various connections across school, family, and friends were “about the same” as pre-pandemic. Moreover, close family ties appear stronger. A whopping 45% of teens in the sample reported that they’ve grown closer to their parents since the pandemic hit.

What should schools make of these trends? National averages, after all, tell you little about the specific young people in your classroom or school.

If anything, Pew’s data should remind school leaders to examine their own student population to better grasp the connections their students have and haven’t maintained both inside and outside of class. From there, administrators and educators can work to ensure that students who do feel connected stay connected, with the tools and mindsets to maintain strong relationships. And if Pew’s data is any clue, for those students experiencing disconnection, schools would be wise to start by recouping or strengthening connections that may have waned in recent years.

A Promising Strategy: Relationship Mapping

One particular strategy can help schools and students reflect on these questions in a data-driven, asset-based, and equitable way: relationship mapping. The strategy allows schools to unearth relationship data that otherwise remains hidden behind grades, attendance, or anecdotes. Crucially, on the heels of the pandemic, schools can also design relationship-mapping activities in a way that not only identifies relationship assets, but that also urges students to mobilize and reactivate connections with people they may have fallen out of touch with.

Recently, we convened a roundtable discussion among practitioners who have been using relationship maps in their programs and schools. Here are three lessons learned we heard:

1. Map relationships across different domains of students’ lives

To accurately understand the various relationships at students’ disposal, schools should prompt students to reflect on connections they have across different domains of their lives, and different places where they spend time.

The domains should reflect the goals of your school or program. For Edward DeJesus, the founder of Social Capital Builders (SCB), his program’s social network mapping and analysis activity is geared towards helping students develop the skills and knowledge to map opportunity networks and identify patterns of relationships and flows with people, groups, and organizations that can influence future economic opportunities. According to SCB’s research, 73% of young people they surveyed reported that they had people in their lives who could be a source of support, but needed guidance on how to go about tapping into their networks.

For SCB, social network analysis is built into part of its Foundations in Social Capital Literacy (FISCL) curriculum, aimed at helping young people to reflect on both familial and developmental assets.  “Young people have connections with familial (family members and close family friends) and developmental (former teachers, mentors, coaches, etc.) assets who all can serve as rich sources of labor market information and career development support,” DeJesus said. From there, young people are taught how to strategically engage these familial and developmental connections to access key industry or occupational stakeholders, which SCB refers to as Gateway connections. By understanding social network analysis, for example, a young person’s developmental connection, like a former coach who works as a warehouse manager, can easily connect the young person to the head of any department within his company.  

While many of SCB’s programs focus on things like getting a job or violence prevention, schools can also design relationship mapping around their own particular philosophy, mission, or vision. At the Forest School, for example, a diverse-by-design microschool in Fayetteville, GA, building social capital is part of the school’s larger aim to ensure all graduates are “learning to live together,” both in their existing communities and across lines of difference. Students maintain a map–called a “Social Capital Tracker”–in a Google Doc where they log the relationships they maintain and build with: (1) people like them, (2) people different from them, and (3) people with influence. The school’s co-founder, Tyler Thigpen, describes this exercise as a way to collect data on students’ “bonding, bridging, and linking social capital” respectively.

2. Anchor relationship maps around students’ goals

Mapping connections across various domains can make the invisible visible. But identifying individuals students know is only the first step. When done right, mapping can also be a strategy to nudge students to engage with their networks in new ways. Put differently, building a network doesn’t just have to be about students meeting new people; it can be about students having new types of conversations with people they already know.

In that vein, the immense potential of relationship mapping is that it can be used to help students and institutions alike mobilize existing relationships and latent resources that reinforce their current goals and challenges. Programs aiming to increase persistence can coach students to keep those in their existing networks apprised of and accountable to their goals. Schools trying to expand access to mentors can start by coaching students to initiate mentoring relationships with people they already know. Institutions aiming to expand access to internships and jobs can encourage students to surface and share opportunities across their extended families and communities.

To increase the odds that students will feel motivated to engage with the relationships they identify in their map, relationship mapping should be tied to a goal or opportunity that students, not just schools, care about.

Many practitioners we interviewed agreed that the more clear and student-driven those goals are, the higher impact the activity can be to mobilizing students’ networks. Researcher Brian Lightfoot, who’s studied social capital across schools and nonprofits, has found that authentic social capital-building often comes from connecting “real stakes and purposeful action” to building networks. “There’s a definitive connection between youth voice and putting young people in leadership positions and developing their social capital,” said Lightfoot.

3. Repeat mapping to bolster reflection and track progress

Relationships are a renewable resource. As students goals, needs, and interests shift over time, different relationships with family, friends, teachers, and the like can offer different types of emotional and tangible support.

Ensuring that students embrace this ongoing value inherent in their networks often requirespairing maps with coaching and support on help-seeking behaviors, and revisiting these maps on a consistent basis to reflect on and update. For example, at the Forest School, students’ social capital trackers are displayed publicly in the school to normalize that all students are maintaining their social networks and to celebrate progress. Students update the social capital tracker twice a year with the help of a Guide (what Forest School calls educators). To keep the tracker manageable and up to date, whenever students update their trackers, they are asked to identify the top five strongest relationships in each of those categories.

Technology can also help keep relationship data fresh and actionable: promising tools like Social Capital Builders’ MyOh app, Visible Networks Lab’s PARTNERme app, and the Complex Data Collective’s Network Canvas tool are all examples of technologies that could help students and institutions alike continuously update and reflect on their networks.

If the pandemic wreaked havoc on what was already dubbed by some as a crisis of connections among young people, then relationship mapping–and tools and curriculum that support it–can help. Highlighting students’ existing networks and encouraging them to mobilize their relationships in new ways can put students in the driver’s seat of their networks. At the same time, identifying who students already know can also lend critical data to schools and programs grappling with how best to support their students in the year ahead.

Julia Freeland Fisher is the Director of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

Want to learn more? Join me at a Getting Smart Town Hall at 10am PT on August 11 alongside Edward DeJesus and Tyler Thigpen. And stay tuned for our report, “Students’ hidden networks: Relationship mapping as a strategy to build asset-based pathways” out in early August.

This post is part of our New Pathways campaign sponsored by ASA, Stand Together and the Walton Family Foundation.

The post Do You Know Who Your Students Know? Better Data on Students’ Networks Can Start the School Year off Right appeared first on Getting Smart.

George’s* initial months of COVID schooling followed an all too familiar path: once a strong student, as a seventh-grader flung into a virtual classroom last March, George started to fall behind in reading and history. He needed help, but was too anxious to ask for it over Zoom where his peers would overhear. Some days he didn’t want to show his face on camera. And his go-to outlet, a travel baseball team, was canceled for the season.  

But George was lucky enough to have someone waiting in the wings: a mentor named Linda, whom his school, Chicago International Charter School (CICS) Bucktown, had paired him with the year prior. When he began to falter, George’s teachers called on Linda. She knew that in sixth grade, George had thrived on one thing: checklists. If he could cross something off his list, Linda told his teachers—like passing the test, finishing the project, turning in the assignment—pride would beam out of him, a huge grin on his face.

It wasn’t just his teachers that banked on Linda’s support: when George began to struggle, George’s mom started checking in with Linda almost daily. During a particularly difficult week, George’s mom told him to look out the window: Linda was there, outside, waving.

It was gestures like these, a system of checklists, and the collective support of his mom, his teachers, and Linda, that helped George get his seventh-grade year back on track.

Many hoped that this school year would return to normal. But students are gearing up for more unknowns. The number of school districts across the country launching new plans for hybrid learning more than doubled from July to August.

One thing, however, is utterly knowable: like George, the millions of students who returned this fall need a community of positive relationships. “Every student deserves a team of learning guardians,” said Phyllis Lockett, founder and CEO of Chicago-based education nonprofit LEAP Innovations. “Given the very broad spectrum of students’ learning and social-emotional needs, especially this year, we need to mobilize a broader set of caring adults to support each student.”

Years ago, researchers began to highlight just how critical relationships are in helping students thrive. Boston University researchers Jon Zaff and Shannon Varga found that contrary to the belief that young people need merely a single strong mentor, they, in fact, benefit from a web of close connections. And researchers at the Minnesota-based nonprofit the Search Institute have found that as the number of strong relationships in a student’s life increase, so does academic motivation, social and emotional skills, and his ability to take responsibility for his actions. And risky behaviors, like alcohol and drug use, decline.

In other words, the old adage that “it takes a village” rings true in the research. And if COVID taught us one thing, it’s that students will need an entire village, both inside and outside of school, whom they can lean on and learn from in the year ahead.

That’s a tall order. Even prior to the pandemic, schools’ ability to weave webs of support was constrained by punishing adult-to-student ratios. The average student: teacher ratio hovers around 16:1. And the average guidance counselor: student ratio is a staggering 464:1. Those hardly amount to the relationship-rich environments young people need.

Luckily, some innovative approaches suggest how schools might overcome these limits. For example, schools can modernize the traditional “parent-teacher conference.” Achievement First’s Greenfield School in New Haven, Connecticut has “Dream Teams,” composed of students’ parents, caregivers, extended family members, or neighbors. Teams meet frequently to consult with students about their goals and to solve challenges together.

Students themselves are also a magnetic resource hiding in plain sight. During the pandemic, students have reported missing their friends the most. Schools can capitalize on that, and offer more structured ways for students to support one another. For example, the Atlanta-based Forest School enlists peers as “Running Partners”, pairing students with an accountability partner to help them stay on track.

And schools can deploy modest staff capacity to coordinate in-and out-of-school connections. For example, the nonprofit City Connects assigns coordinators to meet with teachers to discuss each and every students’ individual strengths and challenges. Based on these individual assessments, coordinators connect students to services in their communities and monitor those connections throughout the year.

Amidst surging case counts, students like George might have to endure another year of awkward Zoom rooms. School leaders are spending this fall swirling in the logistics of determining where and when students will learn. But these well-intended operational gymnastics risk a major blindspot: determining who students can turn to throughout the year. Schools’ focus on logistics may accomplish some modicum of reliability. But relationships will drive resilience. They are the not-so-secret sauce that helps students get by and get ahead.

*The student’s name in this piece has been changed to ensure student confidentiality.

Julia Freeland Fisher is the Director of Education Research at the Christensen Institute.

The post This School Year, It Will Take A Village appeared first on Getting Smart.