Back to School 2025- How Teachers Can Create a New School Year Without All The Same Old Problems of Student Screen Time Digital Overload, Disengagement & Chronic Absenteeism

By Catherine Patterson-Sterling, PhD, RCC

As a Teacher what made you exhausted in June should not be sucking your positive life force energy out of your soul by the third week of September as old student classroom habits around chronic cell phone distraction, absenteeism, and disengagement start up-taking again like the ending of a really bad movie.

Let’s do this school year different and here is how-

There is an opportunity to:

1. Address screen time digital overload by sharing with students the brain science (even if this is an English or Language Arts class) so they can have words for what they are experiencing

2. Provide students with skills around resiliency so that they are not consumed by their big feelings and reduced to a puddle of tears when someone looks at them the wrong way

3. Support students around future planning so that they get back the “why of education” and realize that they are in charge of building their own dreams

Now we can do this in a fun and engaging way with these themes revisited weekly with ready-made social emotional learning lesson plans, videos, quizzes, and writing exercises without painstaking hours of lesson planning as well as research.

My journey as an educator and clinical supervisor was to try to build back emotional and social learning into the classroom by creating animated characters in urschool life who struggled with the same issues except that as part of lessons, students would then be able to help fix their issues while learning about dopamine, cell phone addictions, online toxic culture impacting self-esteem, and how to stay motivated with future goals.

Now free teacher copies of 80 lesson plans are available for teachers grades 5 to 12 with a program called “Twenty” ( which represents 20 healthy habits for youth) which you can access for yourself as an educator or for individual account keys for students at your school.  These resources include engaging videos and materials with lesson plans, quizzes, reflection exercises all pre-loaded on to a learning management system that can be projected in class or utilized with individual student account keys for students grades 5 to 12.

Access your free teacher copy today at https://www.softskillstrainingcenter.com 

Educators know all too well that young people need resources and skills for 3 m’s -managing technology, mitigating mental health challenges, and mastering future goal-setting.

If we give our students a toolbox of skills weaved through the work we do with writing and class discussions, then we can help set them up for success while addressing all of the other challenges that can detract us away from the love of teaching in a classroom that can now be focused on learning.

About The Writer:

Catherine Patterson-Sterling, PhD, RCC is an educator of 20+ years with diverse experience in all levels of elementary, high school, and post secondary education as a teacher, counsellor, and clinical supervisor. With extensive experience in research and counselling, she understands the impact as well as sources of disengagement as well as chronic absenteeism on learners at all levels. She is also the creator of this new innovative program “Twenty” sponsored by Soft Skills Training Center and Patterson-Sterling Consulting and Counselling Services.