When you think back to the beginning of last year versus this year, what is the key differentiator?

Eyes. You see people’s eyes now all the time in a way that you didn’t before. People are engaged eye to eye, face to face in a way that often it was a glance up from the screen.

You’re listening to TEDMED conversations, where we share stories in health and medicine to inspire change for a healthier world. I’m your host, Kelly Thomas.

Today, I’m speaking with Bill Knauer, head of the Harvey School in Catona, New York. Leading into the twenty twenty four school year, the Harvey School announced its shift to a phone free environment in its upper school. Bill shares what led to this new policy, how he’s navigated the transition, and how it’s already been a transformational experience for the entire community only a few months into the school year.

Thank you, Bill, for joining TEDMED today to speak about the Harvey School’s journey to a a phone free environment. I know you’ve been head of the Harvey School for over eight years.

And so when you think back to those previous years, how did you see over time the environment change with cell phone usage becoming more popular?

I think that we’ve watched a progression where it just became more and more accepted as the norm. Right? Whereas, you know, years ago, phones were an add on. Now they’re so integrated in everyone’s lives that it’s almost impossible to see people who aren’t looking at their phone, whether they’re standing in line, whether they’re walking down the street.

And so I think we were seeing a parallel of that at school where it was just becoming ubiquitous, whether it was in the student commons or the lunchroom outside in the quad, phones are really just everywhere. And in addition to that, depending on the classroom, it was also creating various degrees of distraction. Some teachers were already taking away phones before we went with this initiative. So they’re beginning of class and giving them back, but certainly, there were classroom issues around being distracted.

Do you feel like the students were not interacting with each other as much too even when they’re in this downtime in the commons or at lunch or if they have studies?

That’s certainly one of the main reasons that we went forward with this. You know, I think that part of that evolution I you know, COVID, I think, had an impact on this as well. And I think in some ways, it was interesting because for students in school who couldn’t be on campus, I think that the phones were actually a lifeline. They were able to connect. They were able to communicate. And so I think giving that up when they came here was hard, and therefore, sometimes the face to face interaction was actually more difficult than being behind their phones. And so I think that that’s an important piece of what we’ve seen, which is it went from people looking down into their phones to now interacting with each other much more.

Was there a specific turning point that led you to put a phone free environment policy into place?

Well, certainly, we were getting feedback from from faculty. At the end of the the last academic year, we had a faculty meeting, and I asked four questions. What were teachers most proud of from the year? What were they most grateful for?

What was most challenging? And, you know, what was the one suggestion they would have for the leadership team? And the challenging suggestion part, overall, the highest request was do something about the phones. It was having an impact in not only the classrooms, but in the social interactions as well.

So, you know, I think that sometimes in class, teachers, even when they were managing it, would run into, you know, hidden use where people would be looking at the phone when they shouldn’t have been under the table or excuses. You know, my parent needed to contact me. That’s why I was on the phone. So this constant battle to try to get the phones under control, I think, was really creating a challenge for day to day life in the school.

Makes the teaching job a little bit harder if they’re also having to monitor if somebody’s making a a movie while class is on.

Exactly.

Very difficult. I know we’re seeing so many different types of policies go into place in this school year in particular, I feel. And there is some complete bans and other options where the students just need to leave their phone in their locker for the day. What were the options that the Harvey School looked at, and how did you weigh them and and come to one final solution?

Yeah. That’s a great question. So part of this leading up to this was a process besides the conversation with faculty and staff. You know, we had the middle school experience to draw on where we were collecting phones from from middle school students, and not all of them had phones to begin with. And so we were essentially phone free in middle school. And then, you know, looking at the research that was coming out in in particular, the anxious generation, you know, Jonathan Haidt’s book caught a lot of attention, and so that was a talking point.

You know, looking at conversations with how other schools had handled it or how they were considering handling it. So all of those sort of weighed into what is the model that we wanna go forward with. And, you know, there were really four different ways of looking at it. We could just forbid use during the day.

We could say, you can have your phones, but just don’t take them out. Don’t use them. We didn’t really think that that was a practical way to move forward. It was gonna be constant enforcement.

The extreme end of the spectrum will just don’t bring your phones at all. Leave them at home. That’s not really practical in this day and age, particularly with students who are driving, parents who need to reach them after school, all the coordination. So that sort of fell either side.

So the two models that you’re really seeing in schools right now are either collecting the phones and somehow keeping them during the day and then giving them back at the end of the day, or what we decided on, which was the Yonder pouch, which is a a pouch that locks shut with a magnet, and students maintain their own phone, keep their phone during the day. They can keep it in the bag. They keep it in the car. They keep it in the locker.

It just doesn’t get used during the day, and they don’t have access to it in that way. So for us, it was the logical solution that created the outcome that we wanted because we were essentially not trying to create a policy as much as we were trying to change culture. And we wanted to change the way that students interacted. And if they were constantly having to make the decision to use their phone or not, it added another layer of distraction.

And, you know, there’s research out there that says even the presence of an active phone when students are trying to do something else takes away tension, distracts, all of that. So we really wanted to create a way that essentially said to students, they’re just not there. They’re not available. Try to forget about them during the day, and let’s move on with, you know, the life of the school.

I would agree with that. Just the distraction of having it out at our family dinner table, We have a phone free zone, and it makes it so much easier to sit and have a conversation and talk about what’s happened over the day. I also think the language that you’ve chosen to use is interesting. You see the word ban in the news all the time, which is a very reactionary word to me at least.

Yeah.

You have a cell free environment, which speaks, I think, to your thought process that you really wanna try to change the culture. Was that something that you work together as a team to come up with the language?

We started the conversation last year, and we had that end of the year faculty meeting. And we actually invited faculty, a volunteer basis, to come to campus if they wanted to talk about this. And we had more than twenty teachers take time out of their summer to come back. And it really was wanting to focus on that cultural piece. We didn’t want it to be about enforcement because there’s enough things during the day that you’re trying to manage to have another piece was just gonna make it more difficult. And so to try to remove them through the equation was the purpose. And at the end of the day, we were hoping that people would actually buy into it as they got used to this this, you know, sort of new reality.

When did you let the parents know before the beginning of the school year that the policies at school would be changing and they’d be given a Yondr couch?

That’s a great question too because we had a lot of conversations about that. We talked to the folks at Yondr who’ve done this a lot, talked to other schools.

And we tend at Harvey to be a pretty collaborative environment, and we wanna get feedback. We wanna get input.

And with this piece, after much consideration, we didn’t think that would be productive to start an early conversation with students and families because we had gotten to the point where we realized that we needed to do this. It was almost feeling negligent not to given what we understood the risks to be, mental health, distraction, academic achievement, all of those things that there’s so much research supporting.

And so we decided with much trepidation that a couple weeks before school started, we would send out a notice. I would send out a notice letting them know about this change and why we were doing it, and we put up an FAQ on the website so that people could do research. And then we, of course, offered to have people reach out if they had questions or concerns.

How many of the families did end up reaching out, and what were they mostly concerned about?

I was actually surprised by the fact that I didn’t hear from more families on either end. Those who were really excited about it, those who were upset about it. I would say I heard from more families who were happy about it, but then there were a handful of families who were pretty upset about everything from the way that we rolled it out, that we didn’t make a collaborative, that we sort of sprung this on them. And so we had those conversations and sort of talked about why we had done it. And I’d say the two main areas of pushback that we got are concerned.

The first one around this idea of safety. Right? Well, my child needs to have the phone because they need to be safe in case anything happens. And so we had done a lot of research on that as well.

We had talked to law enforcement. We had talked to other schools. And the fact of the matter is is that there’s really no evidence that phones make schools safer in the invented emergency. And in fact, if you talk to law enforcement specialists, they will tell you it could make it less safe.

And so we talked about that as being one of the things that actually we had thought about very deeply. But we did have the one caveat that because these pouches are made of material, we put the EMS, the surgical shears in every classroom so that if they ever, in a true emergency, didn’t need to get to the phones, they would be able to do so. So that was the first thing that I heard from families. The other piece I heard from a couple of senior families who said that while they supported the idea, they didn’t think it was good timing because their kids were getting ready to go to college, and they weren’t gonna learn to manage the phone.

Our response to this was another way to look at it was this was really gonna be the last opportunity for some students ever to know the alternative.

So our students, even our seniors who are now going off to college next year, will have experienced what it’s like not to have that constant nagging use of the phone and being drawn in of understanding that, hey. Maybe I wanna build this into my life in a way that I’ve never realized before. And so I think between our response to the security piece and between that conversation, I think a number of families were brought on board or at least it, you know, sort of took care of some of their concerns. And then as time has gone on, I think that more and more families have realized.

And a big surprise that I had is at Harvey each year, I do a stay at the school where I get up and I talk about the the school year ahead and what our goals are and what we’re doing and sort of an overview of the school. And when I mentioned this initiative, the room broke into applause, which had surprised me. Because as I said, I hadn’t heard from any families, but there was clearly an overwhelming response that people were pleased that we were doing this and sort of, you know, offering this new opportunity for kids during the day.

That must have felt so nice to have that kind of overwhelming response and made you feel like that you and the team at the Harvey School were very thoughtful about how you went about it, that people were mostly supportive from the beginning. I think having the safety shears in class is such a great idea, and then it takes the the edge off that thought that, oh, I can’t get to it. I assume that the teachers in class do have access to a phone.

So Yes. Every classroom has a phone. There’s also a paging system in the phone that any teacher, if there’s an emergency, can announce it to the entire school. They can also call emergency services nine one one from that phone.

Teachers also have access to their phone. And this has been an interesting piece as well because we obviously didn’t say to teachers, you can’t have your phones. You gotta lock your phones up. But we certainly did talk about when we started this, when we started the year, that teachers were gonna be modeling behaviors. The kids were gonna be watching everyone.

And, you know, teachers have been great about not using phones in public. And in fact, it’s become very strange to see a phone. Even if somebody’s pulling out a phone, you know, know, if a teacher’s pulling out a phone to get a picture of something that we might wanna put on the website or some exciting thing with students, it just people feel very self conscious about having a phone out now because it’s just not the norm anymore. And that’s pretty great to see. That’s incredible.

The other piece that came out of it is that it was clear that some of the families were also having difficulty with the change and not being able to reach students, not being able to check-in between classes. All the things that we’ve become accustomed to doing, I think, is a big change for everyone. I mean, I even talked to a family who’s the the student was fine with it, and the family was more upset about it than the student was. Right?

And so I think that, you know, everyone had their perception of what it was gonna be. And I think now that we’re almost two months into the school year, everyone has sort of sees that it’s it’s okay. It’s been good, and students can get in touch with them. And as we said early on, if students need to get in touch with home, they could go to, you know, any faculty member and get use of a phone.

If parents needed to reach the student, then they could call the school. And we actually went through and updated our phone tree when you call in to make sure that there would always be somebody answering the phone.

Just you know, it was very unlikely to get a voice message because we know that somebody trying to get in touch with their student, that would be off putting. So we also looked at sort of the structural logistics around how do we make sure that the concerns that people had are not becoming realities.

Mhmm.

Oh, that’s great.

And I feel like there has to be some level of trust between the students, the administration, yourself as the school leader, and the parents.

Do you feel like because you have a community of trust already that helped with this kind of transition?

Yeah. That’s a great question. I think so. I mean, I think that, obviously, trust is at the center of all relationships.

Right? And we are a school that very much talks about the importance of the partnerships with families, the relationships between students, relationships between students and teachers, and that I think that we have always we have certainly always tried. I think that we have consistently clearly sent the message that decisions that we’re making, we are making because they believe that they’re in the best interest of students. And if we’ve been consistently able to say that and do that, I think that families, even in this case, when they disagreed with us, weren’t questioning that we thought it was the best thing.

They might have been questioning whether they agree with that or not.

But I think that to to your point, every time that we communicate, it’s either building trust or breaking trust. And so certainly trying to be consistent with the way that we address issues, the way that we communicate, all of that. You know? And we there’s the trust aspect of trusting students to follow these norms that we put in place.

Now that said, we know that students, you know, one of their jobs is to find ways around things. But it then becomes if there is something that happens, if the student does use the phone, you know, how do they respond? How do we respond? Because this trust piece also comes to do you take ownership of a mistake that you made?

And so all of that ties into you know, I think any strong school environment is is built on that central trust.

All these points seem like great skills that the students will continue to build to prepare themselves for when they might leave for college or to go live somewhere else outside of their family. So it’s I think it’s very encouraging that so many people have been positive about it. I know you’ve mentioned some kids get around it. What happens if a student is caught using their phone in the middle of the day?

So I’ll I’ll give you a little bit of an idea of the how this is implemented each day, and then we’ll lead from that into what happens if it isn’t followed. So, basically, with the pouches, all the pouches were numbered, and a number of pouches assigned to each student.

When the students arrive on campus, the understanding the expectation is that they will pouch their phone when they arrive on campus, which means putting the phone in, closing it so it seals with the magnet.

Then our days start out in the upper school each day with house, which is a sort of a advisory period with two different teachers who are there. And then pouches, depending on the house, it’s either they’re all checked or they’re spot checked. There’s also a layer of trust in there as well. And so students then keep their own phones throughout the day. At the end of the day, there’s magnets that are placed at key exit points so they’re able to unlock their pouches.

So understanding that flow, there are a lot of clever ways that you can get around not doing it. Right? And so, you know, there are students who have had more than one phone. There are students who have couched it but not locked it. There are students who said they couldn’t pouch it because the the little pin on the pouch got broken or bent and whether that was intentional or not. Right? And so there’s all of these possibilities.

Again, all tie around that idea of, at first, we wanna trust and then we verify.

So if a student is found with the phone out or using the phone or not pouched, And for the first instance, they’re sent home. It’s, you know, more for time for reflection to think about, okay. You’re a member of this community. You know, this is a community norm.

I want you to think about, you know, why it is that you weren’t following it. And then there’ll be contact with the family as well to talk about this. And then the expectation is they will be back at school the next day and prepared to follow along and and buy into this this cultural change. If it happens again, it gets escalated a little bit.

Students at home again. This time, the parents need to come in for a conversation, you know, talking about why we’re doing it, what we’re seeing, how they can support us, how we can work together in order to uphold this this new this new change on campus.

On the third instance, you know, the conversations become more serious. Is there going to be a probationary period? Is there gonna be and it also depends if there’s other, you know, behavioral things that are happening that might be part of that. Is it just the phone?

We’re likely that conversation is likely to happen a little bit longer. If there’s lots of other behavioral things happening, that that may change the pacing of it. But, again, we are generally a place that tries not to be punitive and tries to be restorative, but there’s also a place where you have to have accountability and consequences. Right?

So it’s always trying to balance those things of making it clear it is not our purpose to be catching people to punish them. It is our purpose to make a change that we think is in the benefit of everybody.

It feels like it’s also something that will help the students build their sense of responsibility to the community at large, which I think is a wonderful environment to be in, to feel like you’re part of that community at school. Have parents been supportive if their child gets sent home?

So far, yes. Because I think we’re making it clear we’re not trying to make it punitive. We’re trying to get students to as they’re going to need to do when they leave us, right, to take responsibility for their actions, to understand that they’ve chosen to be part of this community. This community comes with norms.

It is also their choice whether to follow those or not, but they have to understand that that also that there’s accountability for that. So I think that parents, because of the message we’re trying to send, and we’re not trying to overreact the first time because we know students it’s their job to push boundaries sometimes that we’re really trying to get everyone on board. Again, it’s a partnership. It’s about building that trust from from both directions. Mhmm.

Just to shift a little bit, when you began developing this plan for a phone free environment, did you also lay out milestones that you wanted to measure throughout the year to see if what you thought aside from just a a feeling would actually change.

I would say that so far, we have dealt more anecdotally and by what we’re seeing, sort of the observational piece. And, you know, I don’t tend towards hyperbole, but I would say that it’s been transformational in the way that students are now interacting as opposed to the way that they did before. I think there’s much more, you know, there’s much more interaction, much more face to face students laughing, discussing, maybe playing games, doing things that they wouldn’t have done before because the the the phone would have been such an easy distraction. I would also say, from personal experience, I often walk between the buildings on campus.

And in the past, I would generally greet students, and I might get eye contact for a second before it went back down to the phone. And now, you know, for the entire course of a walk between two buildings, I’ve engaged in conversation with students about things that are happening on campus and the world. So I think that certainly from the experiential side, we’ve seen a huge difference.

In terms of, like, measuring, improving academic performance, we haven’t put anything in place for that because, obviously, there’s many variables at play. From the point of bullying, I mean, we certainly are looking at the interactions and and what sort of impact that’s having, and are we seeing a higher level lower level than we’ve seen at similar times in each year, but there’s not sort of a a true tracking of data around that. But I’d say that the cultural change is obvious each day. And we also are connecting with teachers to see what their experiences are in the classroom. And to a person, they’ve seen such a difference in terms of not having to wrestle with this part of it. And they’re perceiving a greater engagement, whether that engagement will come out as higher academic achievements or performance.

We don’t really have the measurements in place for that, but it it certainly won’t hurt.

And then we are talking about down the road, Do we at least create some sort of survey to measure sort of what is the perception of the people involved in and perhaps on the parent side as well? Are they seeing differences?

Is it is it affecting phone use after school? Is it affecting phone use in other circumstances? And for teachers, how much of a difference have you seen? And then students, how is it?

Few months in, what are you experiencing? Has it been good? Has it been bad? If it’s been both, explain what that is.

That was actually gonna be my next question. If you are asked the students and the parent and the other teachers how they were feeling, but that’s incredible. Informational is amazing. And were you surprised by that? Did you anticipate that kind of change, or was this a surprise?

We had hoped. And I think from talking to other schools who had done some version of this, they had definitely seen an impact.

But I think everyone became to take it so much for granted that I don’t think any of us suspected how different it would feel when suddenly you weren’t seeing phones anywhere and how weird it would feel to have a phone out or to see somebody else with a phone. And so I think that the hope was certainly there, and the research was there that this would be a good thing. But the overnight change in the way that people are interacting was definitely a surprise.

That’s great. Do you feel like you are using your phone less when you leave the campus and you’re at home since you’re just not in the habit of using it as much during the day?

I am certainly aware of it. Yes. And I will intentionally sometimes now leave my phone in another room just knowing then I’m less likely to engage with it in downtime. So I think that’s the hardest thing is whether you’re watching a show and it’s commercials or a game and it’s commercials or you’re standing in line or you’re waiting in traffic or it’s just so easy to pick up the phone and look at it. Now, that’s not a completely negative thing as an adult, because, you know, you’re perhaps working, you’re perhaps catching up on news, there’s lots of things you can do that are also productive.

But I do think that the ability to disengage is something that we’re all losing, and this is a reminder that it can be a good thing. And I think it sort of parallels some of the families that I’ve spoken to. Some of the students who had the easiest transition were those who went to sleepaway camp where they didn’t have their phones over the summer. And they would watch how different that was, how great it was in some ways, and then how quickly they would fall back into the previous habits and sort of behaviors.

So how much this will stick? And we see a bit of that during the day because certainly, our school day ends, you know, just after three. We unlock the phones at the end of the academic day, but we still have after school programs, whether it’s theater or sports or clubs. And so students then have access to the phones then.

And there are certainly more phones on campus. But I would say that there’s also students who don’t feel the same need to pull their phone out immediately.

That would be an interesting question to ask the coaches and the staff who run the theater programs if they’re seeing a shift Yeah. Also when they can use their phones, but they’re choosing not to.

Yeah. It’s I think it’s it’s so hard because even when we see the value in it, when we know these devices are so compelling and that particularly if you’re on social media, you know, the the reinforcement, you know, the the thumbs up, the thumbs down, the approval, the lack of approval, the dopamine that comes when you’ve got something that’s exciting and you want the next one. So all of the programming that goes into this to keep our attention, it’s pretty compelling when the opportunity comes back, which is why we didn’t want coming back to your previous question, it’s why we went with the pouches because we didn’t want people to have to fight that all day. Mhmm. If you can’t get to it, it changes the dynamic. If you can and you don’t, it requires willpower. And we know that willpower per se is not always the best way to achieve our outcomes.

Oh, that’s true. Cross the board from dieting to trying to implement exercise routines if you haven’t been doing it. The adjustable power alone often doesn’t is not enough.

Exactly.

So does the school pay for the underpouch?

Yes. We invested in the underpouches. One of the pushbacks I got early from a family who was upset about it, who subsequently came around and were like, I’m really sorry that I was pushing back because this has been great. But early on, they were like, and I can’t believe you’re spending all this money on those pouches. And I’m thinking, well, it’s a pretty small investment for the outcomes that we’re looking for in terms of mental health and isolation, all the things that we know are happening out there. And I think that there’s nobody on the Harvey team who’ve looked at it and said it was a bad investment because it’s, you know, it’s been such a a real change.

Mhmm. Yeah.

That’s true. Just from the mental health perspective, were you finding that a lot of the students were on social media throughout the school day as well?

Oh, absolutely. I think for adolescents because, again, schools have different philosophies around what they block on a campus or not. And I sort of came from a background of educational technology, so that was a big conversation. On the phone, because it’s being delivered the way it is, you have no choice.

You have no control. You have no eyes on it. And so, you know and the other piece of that is how it can then feed into other bad things on campus. Like, when the interactions go south, do those interactions continue on the weekend?

Or and it’s not to say that those things don’t happen, and, certainly, interactions that happen on the weekend on social media still arrive on Monday morning, you know, and we get the the thrill of dealing with it. But it’s our hope that some of that will be reduced, at least certainly during the school day and the the engagement. So we haven’t, interestingly, we haven’t taken away computers because while we know that people are communicating on computers and might be accessing social media, it’s just not the same draw. I mean, it is it’s it’s awkward to have a computer in front of you in a way that it’s not awkward to be peeking down at your phone.

And so we’re okay with a low level of people who feel like they need to still connect in certain ways online, but it’s just not for the sustained amount of time that it was with phones.

So thinking about continuing the school year, what other hopes might you have that this new environment will continue to change the culture?

I think that it’s been interesting because the the change has been so immediate.

It will be, for me, interesting to see if any of it starts rolling back. Like, if you have stops and starts around the impact of it, whether we’ll get more students who are trying to use their phones during the day, like, we’re done with this, or whether it will truly be something that is so part of the culture that people won’t even think about needing it anymore. And so I think that for me is a fascinating part of what exactly is this really gonna look like in terms of acceptance. And because we also know that students everyone is going home at the end of each day, falling into many of the same behaviors, habits, whatever you wanna call them, and then coming back and shifting.

And so will the behavior in the school have a long term impact on what happens outside of school, or will the behaviors that we continue to do outside of school if we were to stop this tomorrow, would it all come back immediately? And so I am curious to see all of those pieces of what does this look like in the long term. Because from what we’ve seen, we have certainly no intention to roll it back. And so if we continue to see what we’re seeing, hopefully, students will just think of schools as being phone free environments, that it’s not a necessary part.

Because that was one of the questions that I asked to families who were pushing back. I said, what is it exactly that you feel like students will be missing by not having their phone during the day? And I didn’t get a lot of answers except we won’t be able to communicate with them.

And there’s a part of me that says that’s not terrible either for students also to be separated and have that time. As we know, school for a very long time was a bigger separation than it is now. And so I think that that’s also been a fascinating part of this is seeing parents come to terms with the fact that, okay, they’re not gonna necessarily hear until after the academic day is over. And so it requires more planning.

Oh, one of the things that we heard early on from students, I forgot about this. This was a really interesting thing, was that students were so used to getting out of class, texting each other, and then meeting up, where if they hadn’t planned for that, they didn’t know how to find each other. We got a hundred and twenty five acre campus. Right?

We got a big campus. And they were like, how do I find my friends? Like, what do we and so this idea that you had to plan in the way that I certainly had to plan. You know?

It’s fascinating to me how we were ever able to find each other If you were meeting somewhere that you ever like, meeting at a mall, like, that you were ever on the same corner that you were you know what I mean? Like, all of the things that you managed to coordinate, they just haven’t had to do that. And so for the first week, it was like, okay.

Like, they were all putting plans in place to figure out how do we meet up if you’re not in class. I’m not in class. Let’s have a central meeting point. Or I don’t even know how they did it. I know that there were lots of conversations around it.

That’s a good lesson in problem solving and planning, which is all good. And maybe with the parents that didn’t want the separation, it’s an opportunity for them to reprogram a little as their kids are continuing to grow and letting them have more freedoms and responsibilities. And when you think back to your time at the Harvey School, I know it’s been over eight years that you’ve been head of school, do you wish now that maybe the Harvey School had considered this phone free environment earlier?

Well, that’s an interesting question. That’s a great question. I think that it has come to the forefront so quickly, this issue, or at least, I think it was highlighted with, you know, a number of school districts around the country starting to talk about a number of local governments. And it has been something that we’ve looked at, but I think there was a little bit of a, can we really do it?

Can we really, you know, take phones away at this point? Because and there is the philosophical piece of kids are gonna have to navigate this when they leave us, or we should we be focusing instead on teaching them to do that? I think, ultimately, we came to the conclusion that this gives us the opportunity to see the impact, for them to to have the opportunity to see the impact. And as I said, I think during COVID, the phones were actually a lifeline.

And so between the time from COVID till now, I think we’ve also managed a lot of related pieces. So, you know, obviously, one of the big issues that we’re trying to address is the the mental health piece and depression and all of that research is connecting to cell phone use and social media use. But we also saw a number of issues come out of COVID. So to separate those two things, I don’t know that we could have ever gotten to the point of saying, is the phone valuable in that transition or not?

And so I’m glad we’ve done it now. Hindsight being twenty twenty, maybe a couple of years ago, we might have gotten there, but I think there were still a lot of questions that we wanted to make sure that we answered them before jumping in.

It’s true. It does feel like with COVID, cell phone use was already pretty ubiquitous, but it became even more because for us with children in school, because we were out of school, being on device became part of our daily routine just so that children could learn. It is her Patel, which was first, which was second, they’re kind of intertwined.

And it is encouraging to see that you’ve been able to begin this plan and other schools are doing the same thing, which probably does make it a little bit easier. You’re not the very first person to raise their hand and say, hey, guys. We have a problem here.

I was at a conference with a bunch of heads of school this past summer, and we had a number of conversation around the topic. Some schools that were considering doing it, some that had started in a smaller form the year before. And as I mentioned earlier, it really did come down to if we had so much evidence about anything else about the negative impact, would we not be responding?

And so I think because the phones are what they are, it made it harder. But any other influence, any other item that was having this impact on kids’ lives, we would have probably responded perhaps more quickly. I don’t know. So I I do think that that’s a key piece of looking forward and saying, okay. Now we’ve done this. What does it look like as it evolves?

When you think back to the beginning of last year versus this year, what is the key differentiator walking around school that really has changed?

Eyes. You see people’s eyes now all the time in a way that you didn’t before. People are engaged eye to eye, face to face in a way that often it was a glance up from the screen. And so I think that that’s huge.

And I think because of it, you see a greater depth of engagement, a greater depth of conversation, a greater understanding of each other. And ultimately and and we sort of touched on this earlier. This is about belonging. Schools are a place that are always trying to develop relationships and belonging.

And I think that phones were having a negative impact in a lot of ways on belonging, whether it was the impact that social media was having on self esteem, whether it was the impact on the day to day communication face to face, whether it was the things that were being said on social media. So to reduce that to reduce that impact and definitely increase the face to face and the human interaction, I think, has definitely been a win for kids and for teachers and for the school in general.

Yeah. That’s true, that connection, because now everyone will be a little bit more socially connected. So if there are incidences where a student needs some emotional support, maybe it will be a little bit more evident in some cases if you are connecting through eyes and talking more. Are the school counselors have they given you any feedback on whether or not they’re having students visit them in office more or less or different concerns?

That’s interesting. I haven’t gotten a lot of that feedback, but I do know the counselors have seen the engagement and students who perhaps were feeling isolated seem to have found more friend groups and things like that because it happened both ways. Right? Like, if the relationships were made through the screens and you weren’t in that group, then you were sort of on the out. But, also, if it was really easy to look into your phone at lunch rather than interact with the person next to you, you know, that’s harder now. And so it’s not to say some of the same dynamics aren’t gonna happen because, of course, they are. But I do think it is encouraged from both of those scenarios people to engage more.

I wonder if you’ll see the reintroduction of note passing.

Here’s hoping. And board games.

The board games. Yes.

Well, it seems like you are so encouraged and hopeful and happy with the changes you’ve seen so far, and that the parents are supportive, and the students and staff all seem to be very supportive for the most part.

What other changes are you hopeful for throughout the school year as there’s more and more time spent with this new environment becoming the norm for everyone?

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is as we have more time with ourselves, with our friends, I think there’s a greater capacity for creative thought. You’ve got more time with yourself, more time in your head, more time to think about outcomes, changes, ideas, to ruminate in a way that I think we didn’t give ourselves much space for that. And so I’m hoping that we see creativity through not only the arts per se, but in STEM, in science, in academics, just ways that students are spending that newly found time productively and creatively.

I hope so too. And I hope that we can touch base again later in the school year and see how everything is going. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to TEDMED today. Thank you, Bill.

No. Thank you, Kelly. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed being here.

Thank you so much for listening to TEDMED conversations.

Join me for our next episode when I sit down with youth anxiety psychologist, doctor Anne Marie Albano, to talk about how we can help our youth develop into independent adults.

Here’s a sneak peek at Ann Marie’s thoughts on the transition the Harvey School has made to a phone free environment.

One of the biggest things they’re probably getting more of is helping the kids to develop empathy. A real understanding of how challenging some things could be at times, but you could work through them.