Washburn High School teacher took tech out of the classroom. Students call it a success.

What You Should Know

A Washburn High School teacher in Minneapolis removed phones and Chromebooks from her AP Literature and English classroom for the first half of the school year. Students read, wrote, and discussed without screens—and many said they preferred it. The experiment suggests that sometimes removing technology can create more space for students to focus, think, and engage with one another.

Why should educators care? The question isn’t whether technology belongs in the classroom—it’s whether it belongs in every learning moment. Typerighter takes a similar approach to AI: give institutions the ability to establish intentional boundaries around technology while preserving the parts of education that require human attention, effort, and interaction.

Teaching in 2026 comes with all kinds of distractions. 

So at the beginning of the school year at Washburn High School in south Minneapolis, Maureen Mulvaney took the technology and left it at the door. 

"I was frustrated. I'm battling, all the time, plagiarism. I'm battling the phones and I'm battling the computers. The kids are gaming, they're shopping, they're engaging in social media instead of engaging with each other and with me," Mulvaney said. "I thought, let's just see if we can go back to what it was." [Read the full article.]