The Case for Digital Wellness
On the difference between managing students and teaching them
In this piece, I am announcing my theme for the 26-27 school year. This past year, I am increasingly seeing my work on disciplinary-specific AI literacy as part of a much broader project in today’s school-tech environmental nexus. Without sufficient attention to the psychological, emotional, and affective impact of technology, our efforts to adapt and redesign instruction, curriculum, and assessment will always be incomplete. Digital wellness is not prior work: it is the frame inside which all of it takes place.
The ed-tech conversation has shifted significantly over the past year. The early enthusiasm for AI in classrooms of 24-25 has given way to something much more murkier, bordering on dystopian. The evidence on learning impact remains thin and highly contested. Teachers are fatigued by too many responsibilities. Parents are asking really hard questions about tech use in schools. And a political backlash against screens, social media, and phones in schools has produced a wave of new state laws that few districts were prepared to implement.
The instinct in this particular moment is to reach for rules, restrictions, and prohibitions. Define the boundaries. Issue the policy. Hold the parent night. Check the box. Secure the device. And let me say from the get-go that there is nothing wrong with rules, but rules are not a substitute for an education. A student who puts their phone in a pouch at 8 a.m. and picks it up at 3 p.m. having learned nothing about why that seven-hour gap is critical for their engagement with school is being managed, not taught.
This is the distinction I want to spend the next school year exploring. Not whether screens are bad or whether AI has a place in school, but something much more complicated and challenging to get right: what habits of mind do we actually want young people to develop in relation to technology, and what would it take to cultivate them deliberately? That question activates a deeper concept. It is called digital wellness.
What the term actually means
Digital wellness is one of those phrases that sounds self-evident until you try to define it. The shorthand version — knowing when to put the phone or laptop down — frames the whole question as one of restraint, and restraint is a byproduct of a clear rationale and a critical mindset.
The Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, probably the most rigorous research center working in this space, defines digital wellness as “a positive state of mental, physical, and social-emotional health pursued through intentional and balanced engagement with technology.” The operative word is intentional. It shifts the question from how much to what for.
Digital literacy asks whether a student can find and evaluate information online. Digital citizenship asks whether they are behaving ethically when engaging with technology. Digital wellness asks something more interior: does this young person have a relationship with technology they have actually thought about, or one that simply happens to them? These are very different concepts, and conflating them produces curricula that address the surface while leaving the harder thing untouched.
A 2025 analysis of fifteen major digital literacy and citizenship frameworks found that most treat wellness as a subcategory of the other two. The developmental and psychological consequences of digital immersion, the study concluded, were inconsistently addressed across the field. That is a polite way of saying that what technology is doing to young people’s well-being largely an afterthought in most of the curricula we have built so far.
The policy moment
In 2025, twenty-eight states passed legislation restricting or banning student phone use during the school day. More than thirty states now have some form of policy on the books. That is a remarkable amount of legislative movement in a short time, and it was driven less by research consensus than by a cultural moment: parental anxiety, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, and a broad sense that something had gone wrong and someone needed to do something about it.
The early evidence is worth looking at carefully, without overclaiming in either direction. An NBER study of a Florida district found meaningful test score gains two years after an all-day phone ban, with the strongest effects for male students in middle and high school. A separate study using Yondr pouches found that suspensions initially rose and reported wellbeing initially fell before both rebounded. Students needed time to adjust to a policy they did not choose. Pew Research recorded a six-point drop in teens reporting they were almost constantly online between 2024 and 2025, a period that coincides with the ban wave, though Pew did not attribute the change to any specific cause and noted only that it remained significantly higher than a decade ago. But this prohibitive process still begs the question of student use beyond the classroom. “What about aimless scrolling at 3am?”
A practitioner I trust
I want to spend some time on Alana Winnick, whose work will run through this year’s writing. Alana is the Educational Technology Director at Pocantico Hills Central School District in Sleepy Hollow, New York, a Director for NYSCATE, and someone I know personally. Her next book, The Digital Wellness Age, is due this fall.
Pocantico Hills has been building digital wellness as a coherent institutional practice. Digital wellness is not a curriculum add-on, not a response to a crisis, but something that runs through technology decisions, instructional design, and parent engagement simultaneously. The trust between school and community is visible and tangible in this district. Alana mentioned to me that in the past year that only one community member has raised concerns about screen time. For a district navigating the same policy environment as everyone else, that number is striking. It did not happen by accident.
Most districts are nowhere near where Pocantico Hills is now. The distance is significant, and it is almost entirely a function of time and intentionality: two years of sustained work, not a committee, not a framework document.
Her digital wellness hub and free resources are worth bookmarking. And when The Digital Wellness Age drops this fall, it will be the first thing I recommend to anyone working seriously in this space.
Where to start
The temptation for a district absorbing a new phone policy this fall is to treat compliance as implementation. Pass the policy, post it on the website, hold a parent night. That is not digital wellness work. It is paperwork with good intentions.
Here is a rough roadmap of the work ahead:
Start with staff rather than students. Adults who have not examined their own relationship with technology are poorly positioned to model a different one. This does not require a professional development day. Alana Winnick’s screen time calculator takes ten minutes in a faculty meeting and tends to produce the kind of reflection that is impactful. The goal is not shame. It is the kind of awareness that precedes any genuine change in behavior.
From there, pick one grade band and start there seriously. Middle school is where most districts should begin. The research on early adolescent vulnerability is the strongest, and there is slightly more curricular flexibility at the middle school level than at the elementary and high school ends of the spectrum. Common Sense Education’s Digital Literacy and Well-Being Curriculum is free, has over 140 lessons, and includes 20-minute formats that fit inside advisory or ELA without requiring a new course. Their Digital Well-Being collection, co-developed with the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard, goes further on the social-emotional side. Cyber Civics is the more comprehensive paid option, with 80+ sequential lessons built for middle school and a 98% renewal rate among schools that adopt it.
Bring families in before something goes wrong. Districts that wait for an incident are always playing defense. A session on digital wellness before the launch of the phone policy or screen restrictions serves to underline purpose and can help turn a angry, skeptical, or indifferent parent into something closer to a partner. The Digital Wellness Lab’s Family Digital Wellness Guide offers age guidance built for exactly this purpose. Hilliard City Schools in Ohio runs a month-long Digital Wellness initiative organized across four weekly themes that pulls students, parents, and teachers into the same conversation. It is replicable and worth studying.
Make one visible physical commitment in the building. A phone-free faculty meeting once a month. A common space designed for presence. A morning advisory that begins offline. Curriculum documents do not change culture. Small repeated signals do, and they accumulate faster than most administrators expect.
Finally, facilitate conversations between the people who make technology decisions with the people who design instruction and the people who watch what technology does to students. Pocantico Hills figured this out early. It is not a committee. Rather, it is an intentional and structural element of the larger decision-making process.
What this year’s writing will do
Know that I am not coming to this theme with a settled position. I think the phone ban movement has done something useful in naming a real problem and exploring one particular pathway as an impactful solution. I think the AI ed-tech wave has left schools with tools they do not fully know how to use and a growing suspicion that the tools are not a good replacement for innovative instructional design. I think digital wellness is genuinely underdeveloped as a field of practice, which makes it interesting to write about and difficult to do well.
What I want to track this year is the space between policy and cultivation and between what schools are being required to do and what they would need to do to actually change something in young people’s relationship with technology. That space is where the interesting work is happening.
Alana Winnick’s work will be a touchstone. So will the research coming out of the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, the curriculum being built by Common Sense Education, and the practitioners I work with across districts who are trying to figure this out in real time without a good map.
If you are an educator, a parent, or someone who works with young people and finds yourself unsatisfied with the current conversation about screens and kids — not because you think the concern is wrong, but because the responses feel thin — this is the year’s writing for you.
Nick Potkalitsky, Ph.D.
Check out some of our favorite Substacks:
Mike Kentz’s AI EduPathways: Insights from one of our most insightful, creative, and eloquent AI educators in the business!!!
Terry Underwood’s Learning to Read, Reading to Learn: The most penetrating investigation of the intersections between compositional theory, literacy studies, and AI on the internet!!!
Alejandro Piad Morffis’s The Computerist Journal: Unmatched investigations into coding, machine learning, computational theory, and practical AI applications
Michael Woudenberg’s Polymathic Being: Polymathic wisdom brought to you every Sunday morning with your first cup of coffee
Rob Nelson’s AI Log: Incredibly deep and insightful essay about AI’s impact on higher ed, society, and culture.
Michael Spencer’s AI Supremacy: The most comprehensive and current analysis of AI news and trends, featuring numerous intriguing guest posts
Daniel Nest’s Why Try AI?: The most amazing updates on AI tools and techniques
Jason Gulya’s The AI Edventure: An important exploration of cutting-edge innovations in AI-responsive curriculum and pedagogy
A rule followed without understanding why it exists doesn't build the capacity the rule was actually meant to protect, it just produces compliance that evaporates the moment the pouch unlocks. That's true of basically any external constraint, not just phone policy..
This is a much needed counterbalance amongst the fear-driven or profit-driven narratives. As with nutrition education, drug & alcohol education, indeed education about anything, extreme positions serve a few. But an intelligent & considered moderated approach, such as this, is healthier in every way.
In terms of the provenance of resources to teach it, (eg Common Sense Media) I’m hopeful that teachers will similarly adopt a critical and contextual stance before wholesale buying into any packages.