Rachael Rachau and Patty Sinkler of the Collegiate School join the podcast to discuss their innovative shift from digital citizenship to a broader digital health and wellness curriculum. They share how using anonymized student screen-time data sparks powerful conversations and how a new phone-free policy has delightfully increased student engagement.

• From Digital Citizenship to Digital Health and Wellness, slide deck from presentation at ATLIS Annual Conference 2025
• Example digital health and wellness curriculum for 9th grade, lessons and activities
• Center for Humane Technology, organization leveraging public messaging, policy, and tech expertise to enact change in the tech ecosystem and beyond
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
• Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World by Devorah Heitner
• Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari
• Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World by Devorah Heitner
• Common Sense Media
• Google's Teachable Machine
• Photos of Christina's daughter's "teacher supplies haul" - Photo1 | Photo2

Nick, welcome to Talking technology with Atlas,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host. Kristina llewellen,

hi everyone, and welcome back to talking

technology with Atlas. I'm Kristina llewellen, the

president and CEO of the Association of technology

leaders in independent schools.

And I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey,

and I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of

Information Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher

school in Richmond, Virginia.

Hello guys. How are you today? Doing? Well, good. Yeah,

it's temperatures a little lower today, indeed. Yeah,

it's a little bit more mild as we're

rounding out the summer. It's so good to see you guys, and it's

funny because as we're rounding out the summer, and things are

kind of chilling out, and we're sort of moving towards school.

We're just a few days away from seeing each other in person.

Indeed, we're going to be together in Columbus, Ohio.

That's kind of cool. I'm looking forward to that

absolutely. For

our listeners, we have an atlas

board retreat that we always do in the final weekend of July,

which is kind of a busy time of year for folks, but also

sometimes is the best time of year to be in a strategic

mindset. And so we get our board together, and Hiram, of course,

is an atlas board member, and Bill, you are an incoming Atlas

certification Council board member. So this is going to be

fun. We're going to get together, and we're going to

talk about governance and strategy and big picture things.

I'm very much looking forward to it. It's sad

to say this, but this will be probably the major point in my

summer vacation time, the only time I'm actually getting away,

just to give you an idea of how my summer is going, but to spend

time with Hiram and Kristina, and to be able to, in this new

role, tell Peter Frank what to do on a regular basis. Is just

going

to be bill, you're wrong, dude. That's not

how it works. Nope. Sorry,

that's not it. Please, please. I want it to be

that I need it to be that I need something. Just give me that at

least once.

No, I think it's a good thing Hiram, that

bill's coming to this training. We got some governance work to

do, sir. That is not how this works.

But Bill, we do get to watch Christina throw

axes. Yep.

Oh, I can't wait for that. It is a melee weapon,

as you know, Hiram, it is indeed,

that is a part of the mix this time. So

hey on a series. Now, I wanted to ask you guys a quick question

before we welcome our guests here, and that is, whenever

you're looking at strategy and what comes next for your school,

in our case, for the organization, there's always

these moments where you're doing a certain thing for a while, and

it made sense. It made all the sense in the world. And then as

you grow, or as you evolve, or as your school community's needs

evolve, there's a moment where you might have to pivot. And

I've been talking to some schools and some tech leaders

around the country this summer, and I'm hearing about a lot of

them having to pivot. And it makes sense, given that some of

that is around AI and the prevalence of it, and the

faculty using it and policies and all that fun stuff. But I'm

just curious, can you guys think of a time when you were walking

a certain path for your school and then suddenly you kind of

woke up one day and kind of went, you know what? Not sure

that's serving us anymore. It's time to shift a little

bit. So I will be right with our guests who are

with us today in terms of blaming collegiate for my pivot

moment, specifically Jamie Brito, back when he was here, in

that I can distinctly remember. And it wasn't one of those

moments where it was a big shift. Well, maybe it was a big

shift in terms of our approach to cybersecurity. You know, as

an all Mac shop back in the day, it was like, you know, you

didn't have to worry about much because Macs weren't that big of

a target of different things. And in talking to Jamie and

hearing about his story, and hearing about the work that he

did in that area, that was kind of like my aha moment. I think I

need to focus in here and really start thinking about that, and

I'll be frank ever since that conversation in that day,

cybersecurity, just privacy, dealing with all these issues

that come up with all these different services, these AI

services, where is our data going? How are we doing? All

this stuff really became front and center in the work that I'm

doing, if not on a daily basis, on a regular basis, with

everything that goes on with what we're trying to do at our

schools. I

concur with you, Bill, because when Jamie gave

that presentation, I took that work and kind of did the red,

yellow, green format with some of the best practices and

brought them back here to St Christopher. And then I really

had this aha moment when the pivot was as a result of us

moving from on prem software to cloud based software, and that

move to cloud based software introduced a level of complexity

that most schools were nowhere near ready for or prepared for.

And when you start looking at the Terms of Service and the

data privacy, people were signing up left and right for

various services and calling, oh, this is freeware, and we

would go ahead and use it in our labs, and had zero understanding

of what that meant until the conversations, I think, really

blossomed from Jamie's initial work and the article that he

wrote about what he experienced. So this a good time to give an

homage to the Collegiate School.

Yeah, and that leads us right into

welcoming our guests. This is all on the brain for you guys,

because our guests are indeed from collegiate in Richmond,

Virginia, I would love to welcome to the pod patty.

Sinclair, you are the head of instructional technology. You're

a robotics mentor at the Collegiate School. And Rachel

Rakau, you are a technology coach and integrator, also a

robotics mentor at collegiate Welcome friends. How are you

today?

Great. Thank you for having us. I am channeling

Jamie Britto, thinking about when we actually switched from

servers on site at school and we made the switch to Google

products and changed our email from first class, and our

teachers revolted. Of course they did, because you couldn't,

well, first of all, it was change, right? And you couldn't

unsend a message in the early days of Google Mail, and our

teachers did not like that. They couldn't unsend something within

our first class system.

It's so crazy. I mean, it sounds like

Jamie on the brain. He is now, of course, out on the west

coast, but he was an East Coast technology leader in Richmond,

Virginia when I first started at Atlas. So it sounds like a lot

of change there. Let's start with you, Rachel, tell us a

little bit about your role at collegiate. Let's just start by

talking a little bit about what you guys do there. And also, if

you don't mind, give everybody a little sense of what the

collegiate school's population is like.

Yeah, as you mentioned, I am a technology

integrator. I am a tech coach. I work with the robotics team and

just stem in general here at collegiate, a big shift I had

made was from being an English teacher into a graduate program

on cognitive development and got into screens. And the brain was

something I was very interested in, and then moved over to

collegiate as they needed a tech coach. But I brought with me

this real passion for digital health and wellness, digital

citizenship. At the time, the idea of like, how does our

relationship with our screens impact us cognitively and

physically? And luckily for me, collegiate was very open and

ready to embrace giving me a lot of freedom and developing

curriculum in that. And so I spend most of my day doing one

of those three things, tech coaching, robotics or digital

health and wellness. I think if we're talking about the

population of collegiate it's really cool we have such a large

school comparatively for independent schools, and that

was such a gift for me, because a big part of how I like to

approach digital health and wellness is also through this,

like collecting student screen data and student performance

data, and then using it to spark conversations about how our tech

use might be impacting our population. So it's one thing to

look at like large numbers and say national trends, and it's

another thing to look at your population and say what trends

you're seeing at your school. And a benefit to collegiate

being so large, we have a lot of students to work with, around

1700 Yeah, 1700 and so since we have such a large population, we

can work towards saying something that's statistically

significant in trends with our data. And so it just proves to

be a very interesting conversation that yields very

rich data and something to look at that I really think lands

with the kids.

Awesome, Patty, let's go to you now talk

to me a little bit about what your role is at collegiate and

also maybe how you interact and work with Rachel.

I am the Director of Instructional Technology for

the entire school, so my biggest role really is to try to support

teachers and what they're trying to do in the classroom, try to

make sure they have the tools that they need, whether that be

devices or software, apps, etc, and also try to respond to kind

of a decline in when we're using some technology, to make sure

that when we are using. Something, particularly with the

littles that it is really important to their academic

program and not gamey and just filling time, which is what I

think we've had to try really hard to move away from,

particularly with some of the uses that kids are doing and

using devices at home, so we have to combat with that a

little bit, I think, especially in the middle school well, and

that's what I appreciate, is Patty works

directly with me. She's my boss, and she does so much to help us

grapple with these big picture ideas. And I feel so valued in

getting to have these conversations about what types

of tech use and what frameworks we can use to make sure that

what we're doing is developmentally appropriate.

That is really challenging students, and that's pushing

student learning and that the level of intentionality we get

to apply. We don't have to be so reactive. We get to sit down and

think, Well, how much or how often should a first grader or

kindergartner interact with an iPad and what is active versus

passive tech use? Look here and how can we best develop a

curriculum and tools for teachers to use to encourage the

most growth and learning in students, instead of maybe just

taking time being the tech clown that comes in and keeps them

busy, so you can do some grading, and so like having

those shifts has been so natural here, and something that we've

been able to dedicate time and real energy toward. So we're

gonna

back up just a little bit before we dive

deeper into what you're talking about. Rachel and I have one

more kind of laying the groundwork conversation type

question. Hiram is also in Richmond, Virginia, and so I

would love to just help our listeners who are not familiar

with that area understand the types of families that would

choose collegiate What's your ideal student look like, and how

does a family choose for example, I know Hiram school is

an all boys school, but what kind of families are attracted

to the collegiate experience?

I would say that we have a lot of families that

are legacy, families that their parents or their grandparents

went to collegiate. We have a lot of siblings that are here,

sometimes, depending on our enrollment, that you might get

your third grader in and not your seventh grader at this

moment, it's a family school. A lot of people that work here

have worked here for a long time. People who graduated have

come back to work. I think it feels to me, even though it's a

large school, it feels like a family school, like I get to

work with the four kids in the Smith family, which is really

nice, because then you get to know their parents, and I think

we look for kids that are bright and athletic and have interests

in the theater. You know, we're a big enough school that we can

provide a lot of different opportunities for kids, and

hopefully by the time, especially, they're in the Upper

School, that they're kind of living their passions a little

bit as well.

The only thing I would add is what I've noticed,

especially as someone who is new ish to collegiate I do notice

that dedication families who have gone here tend to send

their kids here. So we do have that family feel. We also have

so many working professionals, academics, doctors, lawyers and

people who are looking for a challenging and rigorous

environment for their children. So we have a lot of families

like that as well. And I think that's something when I was

coming here, I already had my daughter, and a big part of it

for me is where would I want my child to go to school and be

challenged? And so I see a lot of those families that may not

have that long term legacy Tye, they're choosing it, I think,

for the diversity of what collegiate offers

programmatically, but also for what they see as a rigorous

challenge in their child's education.

That's very cool. So we invited you on the

podcast because you decided to present at the annual

conference, Atlas Conference in Atlanta, and the general topic

was how your school has sort of tackled this philosophical shift

from digital citizenship to digital health and wellness.

We're going to dive into that. We're going to pick that apart.

I know the guys have a bunch of questions for you on that, but

before we walk that path, I would love to know why that

topic? Why did you guys decide to throw your hat into the ring

and share this journey at the Atlas conference?

I feel like we're doing something different and

that it's working, and we wanted to share that with everyone at

Atlas. I mean, that's really why we did it.

You were spot on. We started something different

here. It's something I've been passionate about because I did

tech coaching in a county outside of Charlottesville for a

little while, and we taught digital citizenship lessons. And

I think anyone who's done this job for any amount of time has

done the dragging the kids through the pre packaged digital

citizenship lessons that are extremely hard. High quality and

extremely well cited, but sitting and teaching something

that was made on a large level always kind of missed. I think

one student who's being very kind to me said, I appreciate

you, Mrs. Rock out, but this stuff is just so narky. And I

had was like, What does narky mean? And it's like,

disconnected and like tattling, and we're in trouble and they're

just nagging us. And it's like, you know what? I feel that when

I'm teaching these lessons that I believe in, but the content is

so important as we move more and more into a world where our

digital lives become our lives, our ability to understand how

our interaction with the digital world, with digital tools, with

digital social spaces, not just impacts our health, but impacts

every aspect of the way we move through the world. And I think

that is the content kids really need to connect to and learn

from in order to be successful moving forward. And so the

importance of it just didn't match the way those lessons were

landing. And here at collegiate, they gave us a lot of latitude

to develop a curriculum and do something that connected with

kids, and when we started to get these exciting, positive

results, we just wanted to share it. So let's go

into that. Tell us a little bit about what

the program is like, and why is it different than what we would

think of as digital citizenship?

Well, first of all, we connect it to the health

and wellness curriculum, which gave us time. And I think when

it comes to digital citizenship curriculum, that was the first

big issue, is finding time in the regular curriculum to

deliver these lessons and to do things with the kids, because

time is at a premium at school, and no one seems to have enough

of it, and carving aside a chunk is really hard. So that started

us with this idea that digital citizenship and the concepts

that exist within digital citizenship completely exist

within the scope of health and wellness too, even the ones that

are like being a good friend online, being kind, being

cognizant of your digital footprint. Well, that impacts

your health, because your ability to be a citizen among

your peers, to be in social circles and to both nourish and

be nourished by your social spaces. That's health and so

reimagining it as how does this impact my health and the health

of the people I care about and the health of the people around

me gave us a more personal in with kids, especially kids who

are in their early adolescence or adolescence, when they are

naturally turned more inward, this is a moment in their

development where they're already thinking about

themselves, their space within society, and how things impact

them, how their choices will impact them, as opposed to,

like, am I a citizen? And that is a developmental place that's

normal and that we just acknowledge when developing our

curriculum.

So I'm really interested in since it's

incorporated into the health and wellness curriculum, how is that

done across the three divisions? You're a large school like we

are. You've got a lower school, you have a middle school and you

have an upper school. You probably have a health and

wellness curriculum requirement in the Upper School, you likely

have one in the middle school, but it's interwoven in a variety

of different places in the Lower School. And then a follow up to

that is where does advisory fit into this? So

wait, I'm going to add a third piece of this, just

to add even more complexity to what we're looking for. How did

you actually sell this to the people that were already

teaching that health and wellness? Because you made a

very good point about finding time and connecting it with

things that already exist in the curriculum. What was that give

and take like within that context as well?

I'm gonna let Rachel speak a little bit more

about Upper School, and I'm just gonna back up a tiny bit and say

in the Lower School, we are still using, for the most part,

Common Sense Media and the lessons that are available to

the younger kids, I think they're fine. For those kids in

the middle school, we're struggling to get enough

advisory time. I just recently asked the PE department if we

could maybe squeeze a little stuff in with their curriculum,

and that's so full that I don't think we're going to be able to

do that, so we're going to go back we have worked in the past

with the librarians and the guidance counselors in the

middle school. I am across the hall from the eighth grade lead

advisor, and she and I are always talking about what we

could do with an advisory with the eighth graders, and which is

going to lead right into the ninth grade program that we

have. So we're working definitely in advisory, I would

say that we've had a little pushback from teachers that are

advisors that don't feel quite comfortable always delivering

some of that information that they don't feel knowledgeable

enough, or whatever. And so. Rachel and I have been working

on doing some videos and some teaser kind of lessons that they

could facilitate in their advisory and not have to feel

like they have to know everything about what they're

talking about with just engaging the kids.

And to that end, I mean, this did start as a

partnership between myself and Annie Richards, who originally

approached me she knew I was doing work in the realm of

digital health and wellness, and I will say in middle school and

eventually in the Lower School, because our goal is to push

downward. It's a philosophical shift. It's how we deliver it.

It's how we talk about it with students. It's how we develop

the lessons. So instead of having conversations around like

being a good citizen, we talk about, how does this impact our

health and the health of those around us? So for there, it's

philosophical shift in the Upper School, Annie approached me and

said, we'd love to try and make some space for you. And it was

really a gift of time. We shifted around CPR in that they

still take CPR, but they don't get official certification. And

then that made space for this content. That was the ninth

grade curriculum. And so the other touch points in the health

curriculum is there's a health retreat day in eighth grade and

in 10th grade. And so on those retreat days, I have time with

the entire grade. On those days, we get touch points, we have

conversations, we do things tailored specifically to the

grades, and it's done mostly through the counseling

department, so that side of the health world, and that helps us

get more time. And so what we've have is a number of big touch

points in the grades surrounding ninth grade, and then a full

module in ninth grade. And so our big goal moving forward is

going to be to start moving the formal lessons down and up so

that we have more continuity, more opportunities to have those

conversations and build those conversations. Another good part

of that is a big part of this curriculum is that we ask

students to fill out screen surveys. It's a core piece of

this curriculum here at Colegio that we got really excited

about. So while they're with us, or leading up to a session, they

tell us their screen use on their phone for a set amount of

time, and they fill out a survey. They send a screenshot

of their screen time so that we can do data validation, and then

we anonymize the data so that we can look at trends, but then

what we do is we show it back to the kids. So I've had these

conversations with students where I've shown them now over

the last three years, where the average age you get your phone

can be a predictor for when you get a varsity letter, or if you

get a varsity letter before 11th or 12th grade. And now this

isn't statistically significant, but it's starting to show

trends. And so what we're able to do with this anonymized data,

and we can have big conversations like that, or we

can have small conversations where we've noticed that there's

a trend in the last three years that students primarily got

their phones between sixth and seventh grade, so right before

travel, sports begin, and then that age has actually been going

up, so parents are waiting longer to give their students

smartphones at collegiate not only is it informing policy at

the school, but I show data to the kids without their names

attached, and We have conversations. One of my

favorite stories was I was teaching a two week long module

where, in the first week, their screen use had this giant spike,

and I showed it back to them, and we were talking about it,

and we realized this was a boys class, and more than half the

class was on the boys lacrosse team, and they had traveled that

week over an hour to an event, and they said, Oh, we traveled

that day, so we're all on our phones. In that conversation,

all the boys decided that they had a game the next week and

they weren't going to be on their phones. They brought games

and they did things on the bus other than being on their

phones. And when I showed them their data the next week and

they saw that that drop had dipped, they all yelled in

class. I went, Yeah, and it was just something fun that they had

thought to do, but that conversation was just

springboarded by saying, this is authentically us. This is what

we're seeing. And then they were like, well, let's challenge

ourselves. And so I have all of these conversations all the

time, just based on showing the kids what they do. And it's

really powerful.

But I think is really powerful is when you can

take data and actually use it and show students, you can show

people what they're actually doing and how it's actually

impacting their lives, and that brings real meaning to it. I

think that's one of the things. I'll go back to my comment about

Jamie earlier, in terms of the way in which we drove home. A

lot of the stuff around cyber was to make it more personal,

not about what you need to do at a school, but how this impacts

you outside of school, in your daily life. And I think this

work that you're doing by showing it to them, how it's

impacting their day to day, and the amount of time that they're

spending on these devices can. Really help inform the decisions

that they make. And with that, the question that I have,

because this is where we often get a lot of questions, a lot of

requests for help, is from our parent body. So how are you

sharing this information with parents? How are you talking to

them about what you're doing and how you're trying to really

improve this digital health and wellness of their students. So

one of the things that we've done this year is we

had parent book clubs, mostly targeted at the lower school,

but also we invited Middle School and upper school parents

as well. We read three books. We made it as accessible as

possible. The books were anxious, generation screen wise

and stolen focus. And so parents chose books based on where their

kids were at and where they were at. So we had a lot of people

that chose stolen focus because they were concerned about their

own personal use of technology, etc. We met in person, in small

groups. We did zoom, whatever worked for parents. Rachel and

I. We met monthly, but there were a week and a half period

where all we did was parent book talks. It was great

conversations. We learned a lot from our parents, actually,

about how they're managing their family and their devices. We did

have a speaker come in in January, after we had all

finished all the books we were reading, Devorah Heitner wrote

screen wise and growing up in public, we had a good turnout

for her, she zoomed in with us. We were not able to actually

bring her on campus, and we had a lot of people online and a lot

of people on campus with us for that. So we're working on that.

The cool thing about the data is that we can

use it to have very targeted conversations with our parents,

and that is what started off this idea of book clubs, was

that we had gotten a lot of questions from our parents

about, what should we do, how should we do it? And we wanted

to start natural conversations. And Patty's right, we had

hundreds of our parents participating. I don't think we

had had turnout like this from our parent population, not since

I had been here for any school based PD opportunity, and we had

so many different ways they could meet and discuss. But what

was generated from that was we got to have conversations using

the data we had collected about what outcomes we were noticing,

what was normal for a collegiate student, what was typical, what

was atypical. The parents were so interested in learning if

what they were doing seemed to match the norm, or if it seemed

to, you know, like they were invested in a way that I don't

think we would have gotten them otherwise. While we have these

conversations that, using a book, targeted what we're all

grappling with, my daughter's going into second grade, and so

I had a lot of empathy and connection to what was

happening, because we're all just trying to figure it out.

We're all trying to figure out, what does parenting look like

when my child can access anything on the internet or has

these tools that can be so incredible but can also be so

incredibly distracting, what does good parenting look like?

And so I showed one group data about like, average age that a

student gets a smartphone. So parents were thinking, well, a

lot of kids get it, you know, in middle school or as they

approach middle school, but we want to bring that down. And

obviously the parents that opt into a parenting in the Digital

Age book club are really aware of parenting around smartphones.

And so the conversation shifted, and one parent brought up Voice

over IP phones. So like, it looks like a typical house phone

lives in your house, but just uses the internet. And was

talking about, well, I use this as a tool so that my child can

call other children without having to go through me. I don't

have to coordinate play dates. They can use this device, but I

don't have to worry about them having a smartphone and all the

things that come with that. Well, then suddenly, you know,

dozens and dozens of parents picked up on it, and now we have

a grade that has, like a quarter of them have these Voice over IP

phones, and it was an idea generated by a parent using our

data as a springboard for the conversation. It was just so

powerful and fun.

One of the things that we're also we didn't

actually implement this last year, but we're going to try and

work on that for this year, is we have a weekly newsletter that

goes out to all of our families. It comes out from the

Development Office Communications, etc. But then

there's also letters from each of the division heads that go

out, and we are going to try to insert ourselves a little bit in

that weekly message. And either that goes to the entire

population, or if we want to just say something to the middle

school parents, we can ask the middle school head to add some

bits and pieces in there. And. That letter that goes home

weekly. So it's an opportunity. I think the newsletters are well

read by the parent population, which is nice, because they're

trying to find out what's going on with their kids at their

school.

I'm curious about how you're keeping this content

current and relevant in order to satisfy what I would call the

snicker test for the kids. And then, as you guys are growing

this program, there's only one Rachel, there's only one patty.

How are you looking at the overall expansion from an FTE

perspective, given the positive impact it seems to be having

already,

I love that question. I love the snicker

test as a question or something to consider, because it's almost

certainly what started this whole thing. Because when I'm

losing my audience, I feel it viscerally. And there's nothing

worse than standing up in front of a bunch of 13 year olds and

knowing that they are cringing at you like I can feel it coming

off them. And so I think that was actually an enormously

driving factor in why this curriculum exists this way.

Because what I noticed was the curriculums we were using, so

many of them, were incredible, research based, so high quality,

but the kids just didn't connect with it. They just didn't see

themselves in it. And so without that buy in was difficult to

teach and feel like we were getting through this curriculum

focuses on brain development and psychology, and we talk about

how tech interplays with something in our brains. So the

lesson is more focused on your brain looks like this right now.

Here's how technology is kind of interacting with that. And then

we do an activity that illustrates the point. And so

I'll give you an example. One thing we talk about is focus and

flow. So the idea that our brains learn better when we're

dialed in. And we talk about top down focus and bottom up focus.

So top down focus. I need to sit here and research and study for

this science test coming up, and I'm going to sit down and read

my notes. I am telling myself to focus and then stimulus driven

focus. So I'm out taking a walk in the woods and a bear jumps

out of a bush, I have to immediately react to that sudden

emergency, and bottom up focus is designed to shut down top

down focus. So we talk about that as an example, and what

that means, and how one system was designed to take over the

other system, and that our phones and our technology were

also designed to interact with us like a bear. So our phone was

meant to tap into that bottom up stimulus driven focus. It's

meant to be something we treat as an emergency, and we talk

about examples of that and what we see, but it's really grounded

in that cognitive science, and then we go off and do something.

So one of the things I like to do as an activity. I think the

activity that's currently paired with the lesson is we do a focus

test. There are a couple online tests that you can find that are

pretty high quality, that'll test your capacity for focus and

deep focus. And so I take half the kids, and I make them go sit

mindfully by themselves, out in the field, right outside the

classroom, for 10 minutes. And then the others, I have them get

on their devices and play their favorite game for 10 minutes.

And then we come back and we all take the focus test, and then we

put the results on the board in the two groups, and we see how

far off the deviation is for the group that was being mindful for

10 minutes from the ones that were playing their games. And

usually the separation is so stark. There have been a couple

classes where it was just like, womp, womp, because it wasn't

that far off. But then we go, look, we just did this to

illustrate the point. And for a group of students who are really

concerned about doing well on their next test that really hits

home, they go, Oh, okay, so starting with cognitive science

and something very concrete they can latch on to and then doing

an example or an activity that proves the point. It's hard to

cringe at that, because they go, Hmm, I get so many more HMMs

now.

I love that description, because you're just

hitting a biology lesson in the fight or flight response, and

then the impact of dopamine as well, and your description of

the bear jumping out of the bush and how it distracts you

intentionally, that made a connection for me almost

immediately. And I was like, What a great way to describe

that, as opposed to just saying, everybody's heard fight or

flight, but they didn't really connect how it impacts the other

focus that is required of you for deep focus. I love

it. Thank you. So one of the questions

that I have, Rachel is that you mentioned a couple times that

you guys have a large enough student body that you're

leveraging some data. Can you give us some examples of that?

Yeah, absolutely. It originally started out as

just a springboard for conversation we would see what.

Know how much time they spent on their devices, and talk about it

up against national averages or other outcomes as the data. I

mean, because now it's a four year long data set, with every

ninth grader taking it for a two week period. So like giving us

daily data for two weeks, and then once in every grade after

that, and then three times in eighth grade, and then so on. It

just ends up having this enormous amount of data where we

can talk about like when kids are using their phones more when

they're using it less when they receive phones. We also have a

lot of qualitative data where I ask questions. One of the most

powerful questions I asked was, What would you tell your parents

or an adult in your life about kids and their phones? And I got

a lot of typical responses, or I tend to get them that's like,

oh, it's not that bad. But we can also see trends in how it's

changing, like they're not trying to defend it as much as

they are being reflective about their own screen use, their own

phone use. But the best answer I got was a student said, I wish

my parents knew that it's not really a choice for us. This

person said, my friend whose parents take their phone at

night when they're not in the chat group at 3am it's because

their parents have their phone if I'm not in the chat group at

3am it's because I'm being rude, and it's something I put up

every time I speak to parents about the protective factor of

parenting of the adults in our children's lives, because it

shows how much they do crave our structure and our support. And I

know that child would look their parents in the eye and say,

don't take my phone. I need it, but we'll be vulnerable in that

moment. So we use that to have these conversations and talk

about what we're seeing in that qualitative sense. But then we

have started dabbling into connecting it to things like GPA

anonymously, always like even from me, the researcher. I

couldn't tell you any of those who's who in the data set, but I

can see that I had this student three times over the course of

three different years for longer chunks, and I can see their

screen use, and then we can connect it to things like their

GPA or their sports or their demerit data, like behavioral

instances, and see if we see trends between time on screen

and any of those other factors, we can also use the data to have

conversations about quality of screen use, because I ask them

what apps they use the most, so I get their most used app in

addition to their overall screen use. So are they on Facebook, or

are they on Tiktok? We have a lot of really interesting

conversations about like, what your average Tiktok user is like

in our data sets. Like, for example, if Tiktok is your most

used app, you are almost always in the top quarter of screen

time among the data. So like, if you're a Tiktok user and that's

your most used app, you use your screen significantly more than

your peers overall. And that's an interesting thing. So we've

had so many cool conversations just based on those trends that

we're seeing.

You talked about the Tiktok element, but

there's also, of course, the AI element that is putting a lot of

pressure in to our digital wellness. As I wander the

country and talk to different academic leadership teams, a

part of what we're talking about is the idea that we need to

create discerning consumers of AI, which will get harder and

harder, because just blocking it doesn't make a lot of sense.

You're sending these kids out into the workforce to work for

people like me, and we use it. And so digital literacy has been

a thing for a while, right? We want to talk about how Tiktok is

affecting our outcomes, and that data is certainly pretty cool.

But what about AI? What does that conversation look like

right now at collegiate

it's really interesting because just this

last year, I updated the digital literacy lesson in the ninth

grade series specifically to refocus on AI. There's two

lessons that take on AI. One is just a general understanding of

what is AI. A big part of the curriculum involves

understanding social media algorithms and internet

algorithms. I see it as a little bit of a gift that generative AI

now exists because kids are seeing what these systems have

been able to do for a long time, because they get to interact

with it directly. And I know these are different, like a

social media algorithm is very different from generative AI,

but the power that goes into making those things happen at

that scale is the overlap. A big part of our lessons connect back

to the center for humane technologies, resources on

humane technology use and like what algorithms are doing to

collect data on us and understand us. And so for me, AI

has been this great springboard into understanding the sheer

amount of data it takes to know me well enough. To know if I can

be nudged into buying a Starbucks coffee mid afternoon

on a Tuesday. And we have a lot of lessons that have students

exploring that, that nudging, that happens, additionally, when

it comes to these AI tools, that we're seeing our literacy lesson

shifted, and now what I have them do is, after learning about

AI, and what is AI, we get onto Google's teachable machine to

just show it them how much data is necessary in order for AI to

make a good guess or prediction at a task. And then I have them

try, I actually have a hat. There's a bunch of wild things

in there, like prove Santa's real. And then they have the

entire internet's disposal in any AI tool to prove their case.

So I have them create disinformation or misinformation

and then present it to the class to see how compelling of a case

they made, and the things they're coming up with and the

way they're using AI to prove their points is great because

they're really seeing the power of it to spread lies or to move

misinformation, but also the power of it to create and to

build and to assist, but also showing that they really need to

pay attention to what they read online. I think this is the

number one skill that kids need to have, is the ability to tell

what's real and what's not?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's

obviously going to get harder. So now you guys have found a

place, a unique place, to plunk what is traditionally digital

citizenship into a broader health and wellness program. How

is it going? So taking a step back? Is it what you were hoping

for? Is it optimized for your school? Do you think you'll

leave it where you've put it, because you're seeing some good

results

with your kids? I think we're happy with it being

in ninth grade. Health and wellness. Not every class year

has a course other than, like, English that everybody has to

take, so they take health and wellness too in the 10th grade,

but it's mostly focused on driver's ed and that kind of

thing. So I don't know that we can always build on health and

wellness classes. And again, as I said before, we're having

trouble getting into PE and some of that. So we're gonna stick

with ninth grade health and wellness and focus on advisory

lessons. We have a significant amount of time, particularly in

the middle school during advisory. There's not gobs of

time, but much more time in the middle school during advisory

than we have in the Upper School during advisory. They have much

less time, because the advisors see their kids every single day

in the middle school. So it's where our probably the greatest

opportunity is going to be to expand this program

in light of the anxious generation. Has

collegiate removed phones from the school day, and also, did

you request your faculty to use their phones less to be models.

Absolutely, this year we went completely phone

free in the Upper School and the middle school, and that is

device free as well. So you, if you have internet on your watch,

you have to put your watch in a pocket by advisory. And when you

come in in the morning and you remove your devices when you

leave whatever time you might leave school, if you leave for

an appointment or whatever, or for sports or just the end of

the day. And we thought that it might be a struggle, and it has

not been at all. I honestly am very happy with the way that it

has gone and delighted. We are going to change it a little bit.

In the middle school, it's harder to know who has devices

where. In Upper School, pretty much every kid, with a couple

exceptions, has a device. We're going to survey our middle

school parents at the beginning of the school year and have them

tell us who is bringing a phone to school on a regular basis,

and we will put a card in their pockets to know that there's

supposed to be a phone in

there. That's cool, and that's an

interesting aspect of change management.

So I'm also curious. I mean, we're

experiencing the success of a phone free environment as well,

but it has introduced an interesting challenge for us as

well. With physical security, if you were to have a lockdown or

whatever, we've lost the capacity, potentially, to reach

out to our upper school students who may be on campus or out and

about. Now, there are all sorts of other tools that we have

available from a risk mitigation perspective, I know you all have

those towers. We have towers as well, but there was some solace

in being able to reach out with an app and say, Are you okay, or

can you check in, or what have you we've lost that capacity

now, and I don't know if you all have had similar conversations.

Yeah.

I think that what we are assuming is that if,

particularly in the Upper School, if the kids have their

computers, we can message them. And I don't know that we've had

a lot of conversations about that, Hiram, maybe we should be.

We don't have kids off campus very much, though, and if they

are, they're with an adult. So I'm not sure what how much of a

issue that is for us, but certainly when you're on a huge

campus style school like this, you've got kids transitioning

from one building to the next

that we have the additional challenge of going up

to st Catherine's Yes, which is part of the sister school, so

that coordinate nature of that program and your large campus,

along with some of your satellite areas as well, make

that physical security piece a challenge. Bill is also in a

similar situation.

I think one of the things that's really

interesting, and we've done it to some extent, we don't take

them from them at the beginning of the day and return them at

the end. We have kind of like the you walk into the classroom

and you put your device in the pocket at that point, but I

think it's interesting just listening to the conversation,

because by putting that away, I think what are the choices that

you're making about what you're separating them from? Because

it's a matter of what you allow on the device that they're

keeping. You mentioned Patty being able to message the kids

if they've got the laptop, well, that's one thing that you're

then not taking away when they put it in the pouch or they put

it away for the day. Because if they can do that, can you do

that? And it's about the choices and the decisions that you make,

not criticizing either way that you go with it. Because I think

that there are definite benefits from just disengaging with

screens in general. That is really the overarching piece of

it, but it was one of the conversations we had about, what

do we block at school, and are we blocking things like Tiktok?

Are we blocking some of these other things which I'm blocking

them on the network, if you're accessing it from your school

issued device, but if you're not taking the phone away from the

kid, I'm not blocking anything because I'm not touching

anything on that device. So I think it comes down to the

conversations that you're having about what your goals are from

removing the student from that particular piece of technology

or that particular screen, and then how you manage that, how

you communicate that to parents, because I think those are really

the important things in terms of the expectations that you're

setting for the actions that you're taking.

I think that we did a good job of messaging

parents, and we got very little feedback when we made this

announcement. We did have people concerned about being able to

get to their child, to be able to communicate with them

instantly. And you know, they can always email them, because

they do have their computers. We heard from the kids in the upper

school that they were happy that we did this on the whole and the

thing that I noticed is that in our gathering places, like in

the library and in the cafe, which is a lovely gathering

place, it's so loud in there the kids are talking to each other.

It is lovely. The person in charge of Student Life got all

these games for kids. They're playing cards. Hopefully they're

not paying poker and gambling, but you just saw how much more

social they were at lunch during a free period. It was

delightful.

Well, it's interesting, because that

actually came up in our conversations too. The kids

really took it well, especially after a few weeks of living it.

They were like, yeah, it's okay. I like it better. But when we

were discussing this idea of, do we let them keep it in their

backpacks? Do we put them in each room? Part of that

conversation was, if there was a bear in the corner of the room

while you were learning math, would you pay attention to math?

And the kids and those conversations got really good,

because within the context of a stimulus that can pull your

focus, we talked about phantom vibrations, and I asked the

kids, have you ever felt your phone buzz and then reach down

you don't have your phone on your person? And everybody's

like, Oh, yeah, absolutely. I was like, that's that connection

your brain has to that device. It's treating it like a

dangerous bear or something of high importance that your brain

has to focus on. And so part of putting them fully away in a

place that's far from them had to do with giving them that

psychological break from that stimulus, that idea that as the

adults were cutting this thing off and giving you that time and

freedom away from it. And there was again, some early pushback,

but then it became something where I think that most of the

kids could recognize the feeling they had after a while. That

part, for me, was really powerful. I was not fully. On

board with the idea. I spent a lot of time in the what if we

need to teach them to manage it better. Camp, not the whole

time, but a lot of my brain spent time questioning that

piece just to make sure that it was coming up. But then, after

deciding it and living it for a while, I was like, Nope, it's

great. We can learn how to deal with it later.

That's awesome. Before we go, I do want

to just ask a quick question of you, and that is about the

teacher piece of this. So if we have listeners who are

interested in evolving their programming to have some of

these conversations and lessons with kids, there's obviously the

teacher component and changing things, adding more, putting

more on them. Is there any advice that you have on the

change management piece for the faculty as you try to roll out

these programs?

Yeah, here at collegiate a big piece of it is

just helping teachers understand that they absolutely have

everything they need to teach these lessons. So the cognitive

piece, the mini lesson is packaged, and anyone can pick it

up and grab it. It's heavily cited, and that piece can be

delivered. But the powerful piece of this is in the

exercises, and is in connecting with the kids and having those

conversations and being your most authentic self. I found

that this curriculum does the best as in digital health and

wellness, broadly speaking, when I am sharing my experiences,

because I think we all go through this struggle in some

way or another, and even if you're not the expert in the

field on your phone or how it interacts with you, you still

use a phone. You still know how it impacts your day to day life

in good ways and in bad ways, and then joining in those

conversations as a learner. So like, when we talk about skills

we may or may not be developing. So there's like, this

conversation about, did our spatial skills take a hit

because of maps? And that's a fun conversation we have. But

like, I had to come at that originally from a place of like,

well, how does it impact me? Like, I can't get to, you know,

Pittsburgh right now by myself, without help or without my

phone, and that is a change. And so bringing your experiences to

the conversation is enough. That's where the power is to me,

is we model. I don't need teachers, or our teachers to be

experts at this, but their experiences with the tech and

how they've seen it impact kids, themselves and others. That's

the valuable

piece. I really appreciate that. Thank

you for sharing that piece of it. Rachel and Patty, this has

been such a pleasure to chat with you. It's been such a great

hour of our time getting to know more about collegiate but in

particular, to kind of pick apart the presentation that you

gave at the Atlas conference. Thanks for doing the remix for

us here and bringing it to our broader audience. I think it's

fantastic, and certainly I could see where our audience, both in

person and on the pod, would love to hear how this is going

over some time. So I hope that you will be open to coming back

and joining us and giving an update in due time.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having us. We

really appreciate it something we're super excited about, and

we'd love to hear from anyone or to connect to anybody who's

interested in doing this kind of work as

well. I would echo what Rachel just said. I

appreciate the opportunity to be here, but also, if our members

in Atlas want to reach out and find out more about the program.

We're happy to talk to them. I love

that. That's the Atlas way. That's the

community right there. Thank you guys so much for that offer.

This has been such a pleasure, and thank you again for joining

us. Could you imagine a saint saying, Go

cougars, there you go. Nice

playing friendly in the city of

Richmond, Virginia?

You This has been talking technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of technology leaders in

independent schools. For more information about Atlas and

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