What elementary schools are slowly learning about screens

Sarah Schneider Kavanagh and Katie A. Danielson

Walk into a second-grade classroom today and it may seem like little has changed over the past few decades: Teachers still greet students at the door. Classrooms still have colorful rugs and educational posters on the walls.

But the picture book the children are listening to isn’t being read by the teacher sitting beside them on the rug — it’s playing on an interactive whiteboard. The book itself isn’t even physically in the room. Instead, its pages (with added animations) are projected on a screen while audio narrates the text. Later, children wear headphones while clicking through individualized reading lessons. After lunch, they each complete their own adaptive math activities on Chromebooks instead of gathering at tiny tables to solve problems together.

These changes happened so gradually (and then so suddenly during the pandemic) that many parents don’t realize how different many aspects of elementary school have become. And it all happened with little public debate. Today, nearly 80 percent of school districts issue kindergarteners, first-graders and second-graders devices or allow them to bring them from home.
Screens are no longer occasional classroom tools. They organize the school day. This isn’t simply a story about technology. It’s a story about what happens when the medium through which children learn reshapes learning itself.
Elementary school always taught more than reading and mathematics. Children learned how to wait for someone else’s idea to be expressed before sharing their own, to negotiate disagreements and explain their thinking. This was an essential aspect of growing up, it wasn’t just a nice byproduct of being in a classroom. When the relational aspect of learning is removed, the conditions that allow these skills to grow are also removed.