A Balanced Approach to Learning

I read an interesting story (“What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens, 4/6/26) this morning, a story originally published by The Atlantic earlier this week:

“For more than a decade, Dylan Kane, a seventh-grade math teacher in Leadville, Colorado, leaned into technology as a way to improve his classes. Starting in 2014, he dragged Chromebook carts down hallways to make sure all of his students could use a device. He assessed the available apps, built his own math-instruction website, and embedded software to prevent kids from playing games or exploring inappropriate sites. He kept adapters around the room so everyone could charge up.”

“Then, in January, he took the Chromebooks away. He had sensed that the technology was falling short of its promises. Within weeks of ditching the screens, he saw how they had been holding both him and his students back. Given my own research on children and education, I reached out to him when I learned from a colleague about his experiment.”

“Laptops and tablets have become ubiquitous in classrooms across the country. About 90 percent of school districts provide every student with a school-issued laptop or tablet. A nationally representative survey from 2021 of ed-tech use by teachers found that more than half had their students use screens for up to four hours a day, and more than a quarter had students spend at least five hours on screens in a typical school day.”

“The great promise of educational technology is personalization. Every student suffers from ‘Swiss-cheese gaps’ in their knowledge. Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy and an evangelist for how tech and tutoring can enhance learning, once said. Yet finding and filling these holes is a serious challenge for a teacher with 20 or more students who span several grade levels of ability. Specifically designed apps, websites, and now AI tutors tout not just ways to measure the abilities of every student, but also software that adapts to each student’s interests and skills. Algorithms are meant to ensure that no student falls through the cracks.”

“Yet Kane found that the reality was more complicated. An early adopter, he helped pioneer an experiment at his school to give eighth graders laptops, and he was a swift cheerleader for Desmos, an online graphing tool that lets students drag sliders and manipulate equations. But something was nagging at him. Even with the best-designed software, built with pause functions so he could remotely freeze students’ screens to recapture their attention, he noticed that his students tended to stare at their screens during class discussions. ‘There’s this gravity that the screens exert on student attention,’ he told me. ‘They’re waiting for it to unpause, waiting for it to pull them back in.’”

“He tried having them tilt their screens down, but they would slyly tilt them back up. He tried having them close their Chromebooks entirely, but then he was spending precious minutes managing the transition to and from screens, reconnecting to the internet, troubleshooting the inevitable problems: the charger that wouldn’t work, the software that inexplicably blocked the wrong websites, the Chromebook that was suddenly dead. ‘You might be amazed at how much time I spend dealing with stuff like that,’ he said.”

“Already frustrated, Kane read the December book The Digital Delusion, in which Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and an educator, blames technology for the widely documented decline in student achievement. Although Kane disagreed with Horvath’s insistence that screens in classrooms are the primary culprit behind declining test scores, he began to wonder if the Chromebooks in his own classroom were causing more harm than good.”

“After years of accumulated doubt, Kane decided to run an experiment: no Chromebooks for a month. He soon discovered that he didn’t miss the tech.”

“’If I walk by Jimmy and I see he answered the first two questions and the third one is blank, that gives me a ton of information,’ Kane said. When he sees that Jimmy is clearly confused about No. 3, Kane can stop and help him. Screens, however, made it possible for a student to look busy for an entire class period without Kane ever knowing he was stuck.”

“Kane ends every class with a short mixed-practice assignment, a retrieval exercise that revisits the day’s lesson and older material. He’d been delivering it digitally; in January, he switched to paper. He was surprised to discover that this raised the assignment-completion rate – from 45 to 62 percent – of the students who were the least likely to finish and submit their work before, even though the digital version could technically be finished after class. He now speculates that because working in pencil and paper slows students down and makes their thinking process visible, they are better able to push through hard concepts.”

“There is no question that technology can support learning. But somewhere along the way, what was once a 30-minute intervention became kids glued to laptops at school – and at home, too, because many homework assignments and materials are virtual. Educators are still trying to figure out how to balance technological tools that can be both enormously helpful and perniciously distracting. ‘I’ve been in classrooms that had lots of ed tech where very little learning was taking place,’ Natalie Wexler, the author of Beyond the Science of Reading and The Knowledge Gap, writes, ‘and I’ve been in classrooms with very little ed tech where lots of learning was taking place. But the absence of ed tech doesn’t ensure learning.’”

When we ran a personalized learning lab school over ten years ago now, we learned a few things about using ed tech as a tool and the balance required between laptop technology and face-to-face teaching and learning:

1. The use of varied instructional strategies was essential. Whereas no young learner should be on their device(s) more than half the day, the desired outcome for each learner was to utilize the right strategy to ensure learning.
2. Management by walking around was important to our adult learning leaders, but having young learners submit screen shots of their work was an important strategy also. Today learning coaches can look at a young learner’s screen in real time, a piece of technology not available to our lab school.
3. Our personalized learning lab school found that kids learned in small groups, discussing problems and solutions, as well as learning individually in front of a screen. There’s too much talk these days of an “either/or” decision between ed tech and traditional teaching and learning. The truth is that the relationship between the two depends on an “and” philosophy – both are important to learning.
4. All of this demands a highly skilled adult learning leader, able to achieve balance between ed tech and other types of teaching and learning models. Sadly, too many of our teachers are ill-prepared to help their young learners arrive at this balance, so we either struggle with device learning or we don’t’ try it at all.

Til tomorrow. SVB