When Students Are the Actual Teachers

David Greene wrote this response in 2016 to a student’s Education Week essay on teachers who use social media. A new section after Greene’s text looks at what teens use today, what teachers report about phones in class, and how to plan teaching with social media.

Last spring Katie Benmar wrote an editorial, My Favorite Teachers Use Social Media: A Student Perspective, in Education Week. David Greene, a regular contributor for edCircuit, stumbled upon Benmar’s op-ed and wanted to provide his perspective as an educator.

Excerpt

If teachers want to better understand how social media can affect a student’s desire to learn, they must first look inside the mind of a student.

When I entered high school this past fall as a freshman, I was like most students entering middle or high school. To us, everything feels unfamiliar—strange and new, full of promise. To succeed, we are told, we must do our homework and study for tests. This is true, but teachers often fail to give sufficient consideration to one important roadblock: social media. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Kik, Vine, and Snapchat all rule the lives of most middle and high school students. Walk through the halls of any high school during lunch or passing period and you’ll see a massive number of students with their eyes glued to their phones. More than nine out of every 10 teenagers has a social-media account.

Original piece in Education Week

Response

Katie sure is right about one thing. Teachers must look inside the minds of their students. Social media usage is just one item to investigate as one looks inside that rapidly morphing environment. Good teachers have always looked inside the minds of their students to see how best to interact and get them to interact within a classroom. The fact that she says she still has teachers lecturing or using boring power points is more horrifying. I quote Katie,

“The PowerPoint presentations that most of my teachers have used in the past to give lectures and to instruct students are not especially beneficial. They’re not interactive or engaging. No wonder students’ minds wander, and they resort to social media as a means of keeping themselves entertained.”

This too is true:

“The best teachers I’ve ever had have used technology to enhance learning.”

The word that is most useful here is engagement. How does a good teacher not just use technology in all its forms in the best and most appropriate ways but how, under any circumstances, can a good teacher interest their teenaged tribe to truly engage in any lesson?

By the way, that also includes teaching them when NOT to use social media and how NOT to be distracted by technology. The point is for them to learn how to control it – not to have it control them. This came up when the Internet first hit students and they had to be taught how to know the difference between good sources and bad as well as how to know the difference.

To enhance learning is the key, not to be enslaved by it. That is the actual question here…. To what extent and under what circumstances can social media or any technology, including power points, smart boards, and all the technology Katie mentions be used to enhance learning?

For example, the study of these tools as social phenomena would be a great unit in a class in communications, ELA, Art, or social studies.

How would Shakespeare have used Twitter or Facebook? Hemingway? Steinbeck?  Poetry via 140 characters? Twitter Haikus?

I already know art teachers who have kids do Instagram and even Snap chat assignments.

Take this one step further. Hmm, a psychology class? What do the ways people put Snap chats together say about the Snap chatters? What can we learn about someone based on the amount of social media time they spend during a typical day?

How has each of these affected history? The earliest forms of writing? Gutenberg’s printing press? Radio? Television? Wikipedia? Facebook? Google? Twitter….

Oh what a good social studies teacher could do with how Twitter has affected the Trumpster and politics 2016. Here are potential assignments. Create an ongoing Twitter conversation between Hamilton and Jefferson during the Washington Administration. How about a spy during World War 2 using Instagram? Maybe someone smuggled an I-phone into Auschwitz?

These questions can also be raised in a number of classes. How do these social networking apps affect work? Play? Education? Social life? Societal attitudes?

STEM? Duh! These are all math algorithms and electronic engineering. Do you smell projects based on the study of how they work at a variety of grade levels? I certainly do.

But here lies the rub.

All of this calls for curricular flexibility though. Does the Common Core allow for that while preparing for all those standardized tests? There is the conundrum!

Maybe Katie should take those issues on next. She’d be good!

Teaching with social media in 2026: what teens use now and how teachers plan for it

David Greene’s response above argues that the useful question is how far, and under what conditions, social media can be used to enhance learning. That question is still the right one for teaching with social media, and the evidence about students and their phones has grown since 2016. This section sets out what a national survey shows about teen use, what teachers report about phones in class, and what a teacher or school leader can decide before building a lesson around a platform.

What teens use today

The platforms in Greene’s list have largely been replaced in daily use. The Pew Research Center surveyed 1,391 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 between September 18 and October 10, 2024, and published the results in its Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024 report. YouTube is the most widely used platform, with 90 percent of teens using it and 73 percent visiting daily. About six in ten teens use TikTok and about six in ten use Instagram, and 55 percent use Snapchat. Fifteen percent of teens say they use YouTube almost constantly, 16 percent say so of TikTok and 12 percent of Instagram. Across the five platforms Pew asked about, one third of teens use at least one of them almost constantly.

These figures describe use, not learning. The survey was of teens who live with their parents and relied on their own reports, and it cannot show whether a given platform helps or harms schoolwork. It does show why Greene’s observation about students’ eyes being fixed on their phones remains accurate, and why a teacher cannot treat these tools as something outside the student’s day.

What teachers report about phones in class

Greene’s essay does not separate two different questions: using social media as a teaching tool, and managing it as a distraction. Pew’s June 2024 short read, 72% of U.S. high school teachers say cellphone distraction is a major problem in the classroom, draws on a fall 2023 survey of public K-12 teachers. It found that 72 percent of high school teachers, 33 percent of middle school teachers and 6 percent of elementary teachers call phone distraction a major problem in their classroom. Eighty-two percent of teachers say their school or district has a cellphone policy, and among those with a policy, 30 percent say it is very or somewhat difficult to enforce, including six in ten high school teachers.

Teens themselves are divided about whether phones help. In the same article, Pew reports that 45 percent of teens say smartphones make it easier for people their age to do well in school, 23 percent say they make it harder, and 30 percent say they make no difference. A fair reading is that students see both the help and the harm, as the student author Katie Benmar did in the essay that says the best teachers used technology to enhance learning and that dull lectures send students to their phones.

Planning lessons that use social media

Greene suggests studying these tools as social phenomena in communications, English, art, social studies, psychology and STEM classes. That approach can be kept almost unchanged. A teacher can ask students to analyze how a short video is built, compare how one event is described on different platforms, or study how an app’s recommendation system works as a math and engineering problem. These tasks teach students to examine the platform instead of simply using it, and they can be done with teacher-chosen examples on a projector, so no student has to open an account.

Assignments that ask students to post, such as Greene’s idea of an invented Twitter exchange between Hamilton and Jefferson, can be done on paper or in a class document that imitates the format. This keeps the creative part of the task and removes questions about age limits, privacy and public visibility. A leader who approves such lessons will want to confirm three things in advance:

1. The school or district policy on student accounts and on what may be posted publicly.
2. Whether the platform allows users of the students’ ages, which families can check in the platform’s own terms.
3. What students who do not have, or are not permitted to have, an account will do instead.

The question Greene raises about standards

Greene closes by asking whether the Common Core leaves room for this kind of flexibility. The answer depends on how a district reads its standards, and it is best settled by the department or grade team rather than by one teacher. Many standards in reading, writing, speaking and media analysis can be met with a unit on how social media shapes information, and a short written plan that ties the activity to the standard it serves makes the lesson easier to explain to a principal or a parent.

What parents and school leaders can do

• Parents can ask what the school’s phone policy is and how it differs between elementary, middle and high school, since teacher reports differ sharply by level.
• Teachers can start with analysis lessons that need no accounts, then add student-created work only after the policy questions above are settled.
• Leaders can write the phone policy and the social media teaching guidance together, so teachers are not asked to restrict phones in one lesson and rely on them in the next.

Greene wrote that the goal is for students to control technology instead of having it control them. The surveys above suggest that goal still needs deliberate teaching, and that the classroom is one of the few places where a teen is asked to look at these tools critically.

For more, see edCircuit’s Digital Citizenship Guide.

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