Category: Kids and Learning

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The Plague of Plagiarism

Something that has been bothering me a lot lately are the constant wails I hear from some teachers about plagiarism. Obviously, plagiarism is a bad thing and we need to help kids learn that it’s not appropriate, but I keep seeing incidences of plagiarism lately that I find very hard to blame the kids for. One has to wonder that if kids are blatantly copying and pasting large chunks of stuff into their assignments then perhaps we need to think about how we can be smarter as teachers by asking better questions in the first place, and create tasks that are simply not so plagiarisable to start with.

Just to clarify, when I talk about plagiarism I’m referring to the idea of kids copying slabs of information out of textbooks without thought, or of kids copying work directly from their classmates, or of kids using wording and information from books without citing their sources. The issue of citation is a slightly different issue and I’m not so concerned with that one… that’s usually just a matter of educating the kids to acknowledge their sources. It’s the other types of plagiarism that bother me, because I think that we teachers are largely responsible for them.

I once worked for a company that wrote training notes for Microsoft Office applications. We had a set of instructional notes that we developed for Word, and for whatever reason we decided to sell those notes to another training company. Of course, having sold them the rights to our notes we could no longer use them ourselves so we had to rewrite a new set for our own use. Which we did. We took all the screenshots again, and we rewrote the instructions again. But guess what? They were essentially the same training notes. We took out the old screen shots and we replaced them with nearly identical ones. We rewrote the instructions. And the end result was very similar to the ones we sold. Now, some would say that we plagiarised our own notes. We simply reproduced what already existed into a product that looked essentially the same. But when you are dealing with basic, low-level, instructional information, how many different ways can you say it? If the first step in the instructions is to “Click the File Menu and select New…”, then there are only so many ways you can say that. Does that make it plagiarism?

Using the same logic, think about some of the tasks we set for kids. Anytime you set a “research task” where you ask a student to “find out about…” or “research about…” some topic, think about how that “research” might be done in a way that takes the kids beyond just finding out about the information and extend them into ways that they can use and manipulate and be creative with that information. That’s how you avoid plagiarism.

I once overheard a colleague loudly lamenting the fact that a student had plagiarised an assignment. She was quite indignant that a student would simply regurgitate information from a website and transfer that information directly into their assignment. Sure, a few sentences had been changed here and there, but for the most part the student had taken large slabs of text and re-presented that text in her assignment. Other colleagues joined in the witch hunt, Googling sentences out of the text and finding the original online sources. There was much talk about how this student should be punished, and whether they should be given a mark of zero.

The thing is, when I asked to have a look at the question which was set for this task, it turns out the student was essentially asked to “Research one of the following major world religions.” She chose Buddhism. She did the obvious thing, she went to Google, typed in the word Buddhism, and found some information. She then retold that information in the assignment. She used a couple of different websites and chopped a few bits out of one and a few bits out of another, changed a few sentences here and there to glue the bits together in some sort of logical fashion, and there was the assignment. Although you might cry plagiarism, based on the question set for the task the teacher certainly had no real right to accuse the student of not doing what was asked, and on that basis a mark of zero seemed a bit rough to me. Now, while this was a probably a pretty lame attempt at research on the student’s part, I thought it was an even lamer attempt at a question on the teacher’s part. Research Buddhism. How many ways can you answer that? If the goal of the assignment was just to get the student to read about Buddhism (or whatever the topic might have been) and report on it, then mission accomplished. They got exactly what they asked for. Trouble is, they really didn’t ask for much.

Of course, we all know what the teacher really wanted. They wanted the student to really learn about the topic, to engage with it and internalise it and expand their understanding of it. They wanted the student to come away with a deeper understanding of what Buddhism was all about.

But that’s not what they asked.

They asked a simple, mono-dimensional question, and of course they got a simple mono-dimensional answer. An answer where plagiarism was not only to be expected, but was probably the only real way to answer the question.   Without reading about Buddhism in a book and then paraphrasing what they read, what was the teacher expecting?  The best way to “research Buddhism” is to actually become a Buddhist and talk about what it was like, but that’s not likely to happen.  So essentially, this becomes an exercise not in learning about Buddhism, but about seeing who can paraphrase the best.  And what about the kids who “didn’t plagiarise”? What did they do? Did they learn about and internalise and engage with the topic in a deeper way? Or were they just better at rewording what they read? Did they actually learn something, or were they simply better at covering their online tracks?

I say if we want our kids to think more, then we have to get far better at asking good questions. What sort of response would we have gotten to this assignment if, instead of saying “Research one of the following world religions” we had said “If you were to change your current religion, which of the following world religions would you prefer to convert to, and why?” Same basic question. Totally different experience to develop an answer for it. And much less likely to be simply copied from a website.

One person who has done a lot of great work in this area is Jamie Mackenzie. His website over at www.questioning.org has tons of great ideas for developing better questions. Read his stuff to help develop deeper, more relevant questions that not only engage kids in a much more rewarding way, but will help you develop questions that make plagiarism harder to do, and basically negate the need for it in the first place.

The bottom line is that we have to stop blaming our kids when they copy and paste stuff into their assignments. Sure, every school should have a plagiarism policy, and every student should be made aware of the inappropriateness of copying other people’s work. But the buck needs to stop with the questions being asked in the first place. If you ask dumb questions, you’ll get dumb answers. It’s not about having cleverer tools to try and catch out kids who plagiarise. It’s not about coming up with punitive measures for dealing with plagiarism once it happens. We just need to get much, much better at building real thinking exercises for our kids, based on questions that are deeper, richer and more relevant in the first place.

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Why School Sucks

Reading through some messages on a mail forum today, one particular message really hit me, and encapsulated what I find so “wrong” about our Higher School Certificate… (and not just the NSW HSC either, but all forms of centralised, Standards based, high stakes testing)… The idea that our HSC (and by extension our entire system of schooling) does not encourage a “love of learning”, but rather a “what do I need to do to pass?” attitude.

The notion that a learning journey should be kept within the tight boundaries of a restrictive syllabus, where certain concepts HAVE to be covered in specific degrees of detail (whether they are actually relevant or not), certain concepts have to be emphasised/de-emphasised (not based on student interest, but on what the syllabus says is their value), and that there is content that need not be covered at all (it might be valuable and interesting, but it’s not in the syllabus so we leave it out completely). It just seems so counterproductive to me that our system puts such a strait-jacket on the idea of learning for the sake of learning. Yes I know, you’ll say “we need to have standards” and “how will we decide who gets to go to university?”, etc. It just makes me really sad that our system does so much discourage learning for the sake of learning, and instead put so much focus on learning a preselected set of facts. This email was referring to some syllabus changes that will phased in over the next two years, and even the notion that we should say that one version of the facts is relevant for a particular year, but a modified version of those facts is going to be relevant for the following year… The notion that some content is relevant while other content isn’t… The notion that there is content that “need not be covered”… it’s all so wrong to me.

It makes me sad/annoyed/angry that we have a situation where top-down decisions are made about what knowledge matters and what knowledge doesn’t, and that we have built a whole school system around enshrining that ridiculous notion. Every good teacher knows this total focus on an end product is not what a true education should be about, and yet we accept it. And it impacts on everything we get to do in our classrooms. Everyone I speak to acknowledges this focus on end-product is restrictive and limiting to real education, but we still go along with it. I just don’t get it.

I’m sure I’ve quoted this before, but Doug Noon once wrote in his blog…

“My classroom doesn’t work the way I want it to. In the Age of Accountability, I still focus on process, and see product as a secondary concern. I’m an ill-fitting peg, uneasy about participating in what, for me, amounts to a charade – emulating archaic practices designed for kids from bygone eras. Looking at the group I’m with now, thinking about them, and not the generic, bloodless beings called Students, statistical incarnations of demographically catalogued learners, I feel more strongly than ever that I owe each of them more than mere delivery of the curriculum, and concern for where they stand relative to a standard that I don’t endorse.”

Amen to that.

By the way, as standards-based testing goes, the NSW Higher School Certificate is actually one of the better implementations of the concept. There is at least some flexibility for pathways and options built into it, and there are many similar systems around the world that are far worse. But it still depresses me.

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The Fall of the Wall

We often talk about the need for schools to change, to become more relevant to the needs of the 21st century learner. And sometimes we talk about it like we know it’s something that ought to happen because, well, the times they are a-changin’ and maybe we should start change with them. But I think we need to start talking about it more in terms of this change being an imperative. The need for this change is quickly becoming not optional. Schools are becoming dangerously irrelevant to many of our students because we continue to focus on ways of doing things that simply don’t connect to the way many of them see the world.

I was browsing through YouTube tonight and I stumbled across some old footage of the collapse of the Berlin wall back in 1989.

This video got me remembering a quote about education I once read from Seymour Papert. It was this…

“I think that it might be useful to think of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think that seemed to be a system that was as unchangeable as our education system seems to be. It’s a system, I think, that was becoming increasingly incompatible with the modern world for reasons not very different from those that operate in the education system. It tried to run a country as a production line, as a top-down command economy in which what people made would be determined by a committee somewhere. We try in our school systems to decide what people will learn in this top-down, centralized way, and, for the same reason, it is not compatible with the complexities and dynamic possibilities of the modern world.

I think the subject is increasing strain. The decision to be made is not whether we will continue with school or change it. It will collapse. Our question is whether we’ll wait until we’re driven to the wall and the system collapses from within from its own internal contradictions before we decide that we’re going to create conditions that will allow a new system in which there’ll be diversity of learning paths, diversity of teaching methods, diversity of subjects to be learned.”

You may think that a comparison between the former Soviet Union and our current education system is a little drastic, but I think there are many valid comparisons. Traditional school systems are usually very top-down organisations, and still many teachers believe that running a classroom is all about maintaining control. Our schools are still filled with systems that try to control and direct most of what students do… we have timetables to manage what our students should be doing at any given moment of the day, and we ring bells to tell them when they can change what they are doing. We lead them through a preplanned curriculum, lockstep, progressing from grade to grade at a rate designed for the average student, drip feeding them content that we think they need, whether they need it or not. We insist that they dress a certain way and follow certain rules, even if many times we have forgotten why the rules were there in the first place. We ban mobile phones and iPods because they are a threat to the established order. We track every movement our students make across our networks and we block any websites that we think might not be “educational” enough.

Then, when our students go home everything changes. They engage with a range of ideas, usually all at the same time. Our students are great multi-taskers. They follow their own interests, learning what they need to know, when they need to know it. They build networks of friends, many of whom they have never met but who share similar interests and ideas. Our students may not all be highly organised when it comes to school work, but many of them manage a hectic social life and a part time job. Many of them live online, constantly connected to their networks, relying on communication technologies like their cell phones, instant messaging, and their social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Track the out of school activity of the average student and compare how much overlap there is with what school tries to tell them is important. There isn’t much.

So we talk a lot about the need for school to address this gap. We talk about introducing new technologies into our classrooms to “engage” the students. We keep hearing about “Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants”, and while it’s an interesting way to think about the generational differences, the fact is that the world these kids live in has become one big digital neighbourhood and everyone needs to get comfortable with that idea, whether you are a native or an immigrant. Being able to have that distinction is a luxury we can no longer afford.

I agree with Papert. This incompatibility between “school” as it so commonly stands, and the “real world” that engages our students has to be addressed, and soon, or we will face an unavoidable backlash in the next few years. The need for drastic educational change is on our doorstep, and it cannot be held back for very much longer. As Victor Hugo wrote, “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”

How we manage the tension between these two ideologies will be critical to our success. But we need to start really rethinking what “school” is about because our students are starting to gather on one side of the wall right now. The cracks are starting to appear. This always-on generation is armed with picks and shovels in the form of their social networks, their communication technologies, their access to instant information, and they are eager to smash this wall down, drive through it and explore the big world on the other side.

As teachers, the question facing us is this… will you be there helping them swing the pick-axe and encouraging them to tear down the wall, or will you be standing in the middle of the stampede trying to force them back? If we aren’t part of the solution, we might just be part of the problem.

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