Alien Pedagogy

A few of my coworkers seemed surprised at my response to plagiarism, so I’m blogging it.

Briefly:

• I don’t punish the student for plagiarizing (no yelling, detentions, or suspensions). Plagiarizing students obviously want a good grade and generally don’t have the confidence in their ability to produce it. So I make them start over and monitor their work more closely.
• Actually, that’s it.

Some teachers might ask when I’m going to teach about plagiarism.

The next unit is Romeo and Juliet, which I think the best unit of the year for discussing responsible ways to use online ideas to amplify a student’s thinking. There are always one or two students that plagiarize before this unit, but I just reference these cases as examples when introducing the role of the Internet.

The major assessment in our poetry unit was presentations.

On the whole, I am very satisfied with this year’s presentations. They were by far the most successful presentations that any of my classes have ever given.

• In speaking, our principle was professionalism.
• In critical thinking, our process was to interpret the theme and analyze three ways in which that theme was presented poetically.
• In technology, our aim was to give Power Point a very minor role. People and their ideas were the focus.
• In file storage, USBs were not allowed to be used (I blamed my Vista computer), so our presentations did not contain people running around with flash cards at the last minute. Our classes were about the skills being taught, rather than frantic uploading and excuses about file loss.
• In reading poetry, our aim was creativity through team reading (this was by far the least successful objective of the assignment).

On the whole, students seem proud of their work in this unit and I’m pleased too.

The major assessment of the poetry unit was a presentation that required students to create an outline before they presented. There were three instances of plagiarism.

The first plagiarists:

I caught the first one in the outline stage and invited the group to do the assignment again. The student’s father wanted a meeting, which was easy to arrange and discuss.

The second set of plagiarists:

The second set of plagiarsists were in my honors class. They used someone else’s interpretation of the poem, but their analysis was genuine so far as I could see. Their outline missed the cutoff, so I couldn’t check their work. They didn’t receive credit for their interpretation but otherwise demonstrated skills.

The third set of plagiarists:

By far the weirdest case of plagiarsim I’ve ever encountered. The student maintained that her mother had done the work for her and she had no idea where the analysis of the poem came from. She received zero credit and so did her mother.

All three groups that plagiarized were students who’ve struggled in class.

The major assessment of our poetry unit was a presentation.

Students were given a variety of tasks to prepare for this assignment. Here are the ones that were meant to prepare them for the presentation:

• Class reading of “Ballad of Birmingham” that focused on identifying three poetic techniques, an interpretation of the theme, and the identification of key quotes. We began with making a plan to read poetry strategically before we began to read.
• One class to form partners, choose poems from the poetry collection, and make strategies for reading those poems.
• One class of reader’s theater to push the idea of reading poetry creatively as a group.
• One class to create a point-form outline of analysis.
• Class reading of “Woman Work” that streamlined our reading process that began with “Ballad of Birmingham.”
• Homework Assignment: Finding Poetic Techniques in Popular Culture (the best was an analysis of the logo of a laxative)
• One class of Bob Ross notes on speaking skills.
• One class that required students to in pairs organized a speech that related to one of ten slides shown to them at the start of class.
• One class to link their outlines to slides.
• Presentations.

Almost every task in this unit was designed to maximize student success in the major assessment. So as long as the major assessment is directly related to our curriculum goals (and I think it is), then this may qualify as the most focused unit I’ve ever taught.

The major assessment of our poetry unit was presentations. Students were required to use Power Point and I gave them a few general principles to guide their use of the famous program.

• The speakers should draw their audience’s attention. The Power Point is just a tool.
• Therefore:
• Avoid animation.
• Avoid images unless they are relevant.
• Do not mix images with text.
• What you say out loud should be greater than what you present on the screen.
• Look at your audience or your partner and avoid looking at the screen.

On the whole, most students seemed relieved that they didn’t have to put on a show with Power Point. The ones that did use PPt as an anchor (ex/ Analysis of Simile // “A bell is tolling, fading, fading / just like love”) tended to spend more time analyzing how the figurative language worked and they maintained better eye contact and body language.

A few pairs chose to animate their Power Point and it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that their critical thinking was less developed. In spite of the effort that they put into their PPt, their mark on the scoring card was reduced because of this.