When the phone goes away,
what fills
the space?
Phone-free environments can create new opportunities — for conversation, reflection, collaboration, and simply noticing the people around us. But removing a phone doesn't automatically create connection.
What happens when the phone is put away?
Digital technology has become an important part of how adolescents communicate, build relationships, explore their identities, and experience the world around them. As schools across Indiana transition toward phone-free learning environments, students, families, and educators are navigating an important question: What happens when the phone is put away?
The Alpha Rho Sigma Chapter of Phi Theta Kappa at Ivy Tech Community College – Bloomington explored this question through its Honors in Action research project. Our chapter examined academic research, adolescent behavioral health data, school cell phone policies, and perspectives from Indiana educators and administrators.
What we discovered was more complex than whether phones are simply "good" or "bad." Our research suggests that phone-free environments can create greater opportunities for face-to-face conversation, authentic relationships, and interpersonal development — but removing a phone alone does not create those outcomes. Connection still has to be intentional.
Find your path through the toolkit
Educators create opportunities, families reinforce them, and students experience and shape them. Choose where you stand and step into the conversation.
From Identity to Connection to Environment
Three concepts guide everything we build — the movement from inward becoming, to mutual presence, to the spaces that hold it all.
Digital environments influence how adolescents explore and express who they are. Social media can provide opportunities for connection and identity exploration, while social comparison, curated self-presentation, and external validation can also create challenges for developing a stable sense of self.
Authentic relationships provide opportunities to practice skills that screens cannot fully replace. Face-to-face interactions help adolescents practice communication, empathy, emotional regulation, conflict resolution, and other interpersonal skills.
Putting away the phone creates an opportunity—not an automatic outcome. Phone-free environments can increase opportunities for conversation and social engagement, but research does not support treating phone restrictions alone as a solution to adolescent mental health or identity development.
The goal isn't simply to take phones away. The goal is to create environments where authentic connection has room to grow.
The evidence behind the toolkit
Connect Phone-Free wasn't built from assumptions about teenagers and phones. It grew from Alpha Rho Sigma's Honors in Action investigation — and every resource traces back to what we found.
Four on social media and adolescent identity; four on peer relationships and phone-free school environments.
Structured interviews with educators preparing to implement phone restrictions in Indiana schools.
Indiana, Arkansas, Florida, and Utah — examining how states use policy to shape the school environment.
Indiana and national adolescent behavioral-health data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS).
Did any of this actually work?
That's the most important question — and we don't have the answer yet. Real impact requires real evidence, and we're collecting it now.
No fabricated zeros. No placeholder percentages. Just the real numbers, counted live as people use the resources.
Distinct visits to Connect Phone-Free, counted once per browsing session.
Every time an educator, family, or student toolkit page was opened.
Resources downloaded to use offline or in class.
Responses shared through the feedback forms.
A community mood board of presence
Real notes from educators, families, and students navigating the same question. Yours belongs here too.
Built by students who asked a question
Connect Phone-Free was created by the Alpha Rho Sigma Chapter of Phi Theta Kappa at Ivy Tech Community College – Bloomington. We're community college students who believe an honors society should honor more than a GPA — it should build something useful from the questions that matter.
Meet the chapter