Analysis: Multiple reports show educators confuse technology engagement with student engagement 

An NBC News report investigating how schools are increasingly relying on YouTube for instruction highlights tensions over what learning engagement really means.

Those tensions increasingly point to a conflict over whom technology really serves in the classroom: technology providers or students?

According to the NBC report, parents say technology such as YouTube is designed to distract from actual learning.

When one Pennsylvania parent asked school administrators to block YouTube content because it was distracting her child, administrators “said too many teachers used it for instruction and the district couldn’t restrict it,” NBC reported.

Teachers also noted that they use YouTube to try to make instruction “more real and engaging.”

But engagement also contributes to the problem.

“YouTube is really powerful for learning in a lot of ways because there’s a high level of ease of use,” Lisa Birk, a deputy superintendent of Bend-La Pine Schools in Oregon, told NBC. “But what makes it challenging is that algorithmic part – here’s your next video, here’s the new things that are being pushed your way.”

Independent reports also indicate that teachers now rely on YouTube so heavily to teach the curriculum that some schools find it difficult to block.

A report published in June in the journal Educational Researcher said that 77% of teachers rely on YouTube for instruction, accounting for nearly 20% of instructional time.

“Our research suggests that pre-K through 12th grade teachers widely use YouTube as a staple of classroom instruction – not as an occasional supplement,” the report’s authors said.

While teachers argue that much of this instruction is shown on a big screen, according to NBC, critics echo Birk’s complaint, noting that YouTube is not designed specifically for academics but for advertising engagement.

The video player’s algorithmic recommendations “prioritize increasing user watch time over providing material that may be best for learning,” the Educational Researcher report said.

Using videos can make children more engaged, but that doesn’t mean they’re learning.

What is engagement?

For years, teachers and administrators have preached engagement as a measure of classroom success, even as test scores and student engagement have fallen. This approach has been pushed by so-called reformers who claim that students are their primary customers.

“Decades ago, the expectation was that when you go to class, you pay attention,” high school teacher Rachel Murat, New York state’s 2020 Teacher of the Year, told EdWeek in 2023.

“There weren’t the distractions there are now, other than the bulb in the overhead projection going out,” she said. “Now, there are so many [distractions].”

A growing number of private and classical schools, however, with the primary focus on teaching engagement, are concentrating on a low-tech-to-no-tech approach, arguing that technology itself is the distraction students are battling.

“I just think it really kind of dumbs down the education,” Natalie Culp, a mother of six who has five children at Northwest Ohio Classical Academy (NOCA), told the Toledo Free Press about technology. “It’s distracting for the students.”

NOCA, the Free Press reports, owns 120 Chromebooks but uses them only a few times a year for standardized testing.

Otherwise, its students learn the entire curriculum using pencil and paper, which by necessity requires them to engage mechanically with their learning.

Classical academies around the country, including in Louisville and Dallas, are following suit.

An EdWeek Market Brief report in September said that 63% of public school teachers are now asking for “more physical learning materials compared to two years ago,” according to a survey of 2,501 teachers.

“Students’ literacy skills are declining because of the use of technology,” one teacher wrote in the survey. “Chromebooks and online work are not giving the results we need. I have a master’s [degree] in technology and have cut it out of their daily learning.”

But for some school districts, getting rid of technology might not be that easy, even as the rest of the world argues for substantial reform.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is being hailed as a “strict” trendsetter for banning technology use only through first grade while increasing screen time to 10 hours of instruction per high school student, the Los Angeles Times reports.

This means a third of required instruction can be delivered by device.

“It’s an incredibly robust and groundbreaking document,” school board member Nick Melvoin, who introduced the “reform” in March, said, according to the Times. “It’s going to be the basis for reform throughout the country if not the world.”

Not putting 6-year-olds in front of screens for instruction wouldn’t have been a particularly groundbreaking innovation just 10 years ago.

Health researchers warned in 2017 that screen devices used by children under 2 years old – those entering middle school today – “are creating an unhealthy environment to develop in.”

This might point to the more significant problem.

As the accumulation of technology accelerates, society hasn’t yet adequately described what healthy learning engagement means or separated it from technology engagement in a student’s learning life.

“There is a clear difference now regarding what engages kids versus when I started or even as recently as before the pandemic,” Murat said.