Debate continues about use of laptops and phones in high school and colleges classrooms. Yes, why fight progress? Use them, say some. No, they are a distraction from the work at hand and normal human interaction, say others.

A post on Mind/Shift reviews the range of opinions. Derek Bruff is a mathematician and director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He first cites research that pen/pencil on paper is a more effective learning strategy than transcription. Then he offers a quite different strategy: “Getting students to collaborate and debate in small groups, for one thing. He’s also seen anecdotally that, ‘If you give students something productive and on-topic to do with their devices,’ it reduces idle browsing. He calls this the ‘Google jockey’ approach.”

I absolutely agree about the potential usefulness of devices for small groups. This is an excellent process when the goal is specific, the groupings are carefully planned, the teacher is both modeling the desired behavior and monitoring group progress, and the pace is too fast to allow for wandering off topic. Too often group work degenerates into socializing, which is probably not the goal. And with a device in hand, there is the temptation to check Facebook or phone messages. I have been in too many teacher-ed groupings with Think-Pair-Share elements that do virtually nothing for my understanding of material. These activities become more about theater than thinking and learning.

Where it works best in my experience? When students have already reviewed material and come together to figure out more than any one of them understands alone.

Everyone prepares (reads the same materials, studies the same videos, whatever), comes to class in small groups that remain stable for the duration of the class (they get to know the people in their groups), discusses the readings and propose a question (or three) for class discussion. These questions are written on the board and the instructor then reviews the relative usefulness of each, and with input from the class chooses a few for class discussion. There is a challenge here. Students must review the material in sufficient depth both individually and in small groups to discover the most valid (difficult, important, controversial) questions.

What does this have to do with allowing use of devices? Merely that tech is a convenient reference tool. Students research the text in a variety of ways in order to create context and stronger literal understanding of a text that is “over their heads” at first reading.

The catch is this is not how tech is used by students in or out of school. Accessing and using references is a discrete skill whether those references are books or accessed through phones. The skills are not automatically acquired and should be taught.

In my experience, even seniors in high school never use their devices as tools. They do not use indices in books and they skip the words they do not recognize in an essay rather than look them up on the device in their hands, even when a term is essential to understanding a text that they do not “get”. It is the work of a moment to review historical data, look up a key word, or find the credentials of a cited source. They must be taught to use their phones to do this.

That will be my task this week. I will will assign a complex text, ensure that the groups of three students bent over paper have specific tasks and a discover range of information and questions to bring back to the class and share.

Next term? I will do better.