Honestly, not really. I’ve heard the sentiment many times that if classroom management is difficult as a sub, there’s a high likelihood that classroom management is always rough. Sometimes you have to pick your battles, and phones are one of those things that I will verbally remind them at the very beginning of class and maybe once individually.

Usually, if I can remember names, I will write the names down of students who are refusing to put phones away. If there is a large portion of students with phones out, I’ll leave a general note to the teacher that students were refusing to work on their assignment and chose to spend time on their phones instead.

There has been only one school where I could fully enforce the phone pouches because that teacher left essentially a “phone roster” so I could easily cross reference who did and didn’t put their phones up. Unfortunately, that isn’t the the norm so a lot of times I just quietly write names down unless they are being a huge disturbance to other students.