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 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.