Teaching Students Academic Integrity

I teach online. I require students to defend their opinions about cases on 5 assignments. I encourage them to use and cite the textbook and other sources for evidence, so that they learn to evaluate evidence and justify their opinions and conclusions. I offer extra credit for those who go to the writing lab and offer to read rough drafts to show them how to cite and write; at best 10% in a given class will take me up on my offer and help themselves out. I seek to promote two things with this tactic: 1) significant learning; 2) academic integrity.

I just had yet another case of a student (who did not seek any help) plagiarizing by pasting personal opinions found at other online community-based sites and at essay production sites while filling in personal fill-in-the-blank spots with current information. This student did defend the actions as thinking it was okay as long as the sentences were about the student and not the originator of the paragraph. What made this situation so heartbreaking for me was that the student could not put a sentence together properly in even an email (i.e., proper capitalization, punctuation/grammar, and use of subject-verb agreement) but stated the goal of upper division college at the beginning of the course. The student had made passing scores on the first two essay submissions thanks to content but must have been feeling desperate about the course grade to break down and paste content on two essays back to back.

Normally, students try me with the behavior at the beginning of class under the excuse of "nobody ever told me this was cheating" or "I've always written this way and no other professor has complained." I usually reply with the following: "here's how it works in my class, you get zeros until you figure out how to write a paper without cheating, or if you don't figure out how to write original work, you will fail; how you handle yourself at this point is your choice."

I have actually had a nearly perfect success rate in working with those students needing to learn not only course content but also better writing and citing. They are usually rewarded with the opportunity in the last few days of class to submit extra credit essays! They earn the reward of making up points lost due to needing to learn academic integrity. I've even had a couple students follow up in the subsequent semesters to tell me a heart-felt thank you for "being mean" and caring about their success enough to "stick it out" with them, because the next time they encountered a professor like me, they wrote better, cited well, and earned As--a big-time, long term reward, if you ask me.

Back to today, I encourage you to consider what you would do to improve the learning potential for a student in a bad situation of the student's own making. If the student's test scores were not so bad, which was probably what led to the desperate acts, then I would have told the student the writing lab and SafeAssign was mandatory. For this student in the case study, I encouraged the student to drop: Something I do not do if I can avoid it, but in this student's case, why make the situation more painful on both of us! We humans avoid pain. Other than telling the student to use the writing lab in the future, knowing the student is already failing the exams and really in no hope of getting better than a low D, if that, what could I do?

Alas, the significant learning here is that sometimes the caring professor has to learn to let go too. However, the caring professor has to let go with compassion and hope the student reflects on the past and works toward the successes waiting in the future.

What is an SLE ?

The road map provided by Dee Fink's approach to creating new courses is premised on two powerful ideas : 1) Integrated Course Design and 2) Significant Learning Experiences (SLE's).

The first idea -- Integrated Course Design-- means you design all the key ingredients (goals, activities, and assessment) from the very beginning so that everything functions as a balanced system. This is rarely done. It's nearly always the case that content (what is to be taught and learned) takes precedence over everything else.

The second idea -- Significant learning experiences -- means ... Well, what exactly does it mean?

Setting aside Fink's technical definition for the moment, what does it mean to you? And what in your experience illustrates it?

If we were sitting together and wanted to enrich our understanding of significant learning experiences, I'd recommend we do one of two things (or maybe both).

First. A sentence completion using the following stem: "A significant learning experience is ... "

Or you might like this one better: "You know its a significant learning experience when..."

If we were then to share those personal definitions, we'd find that each one of them would add some small dimension to our shared perception of the concept.

Second. If some of us were willing to share a particular memory of a significant learning experience, that too would enrich our understanding and become part of our shared, constructed meaning. And if we'd put on our "analytical hats" just for a few moments and share specifically what made those experiences significant, we'd move forward a tiny bit more. The more we did this kind of thing the deeper our understanding of significant learning experiences would become.

Ummmmmm. It occurs to me that we COULD do this ... using this blog.

If you're willing to share, send your definitions and stories to garyduke.siglearningx@blogger.com. The e-mail will be immediately posted to our blog DCCCD Significant Learning Experiences. The subject line will be the post title and the text of your e-mail will be the text of the blog. This is the quick and easy way to do it.

If you want to contribute to this blog, contact Gary Duke and let him know you'd like to be an "authorized blogger." He'll send you an invitation.

PS. If you're not sure of any of this, but you'd like to comment on something here, all you have to do is click on the Comment link. The comment will appear without your name unless you type it as part of the comment. If you're logged into your Google account, your name will appear automatically.

Come on. Join in the fun. :)

Creating Significant Learning Experiences

In the summer of 2003 I was lucky enough to attend Teaching for a Change, a week long conference for community college folks focused entirely on the improvement of teaching. That year it was in Park City, Utah, a not too shabby location for a professional conference.

Though the conference is small -- Richland is one of the sponsors-- it is incredibly rich. I met people there from all over the world who had uncovered it in a web search and decided to take a shot. I talked to many of them and they were never disappointed. Lots of folks said it was the best conference they'd ever attended.

It was there that I was introduced to the work of Dee Fink.

It wasn't like there was a whole program on him. He was really only mentioned in the context of a class that Al Schroeder and I attended about "Constructing Good Tests." It sounded like a real snoozer. We only went because there was absolutely nothing being offered that hour. It turned out to be incredibly enlightening. I eventually realized it was because it was built on the principles of something called "integrated course design" which is the brain child of Dee Fink and his associates at The University of Oklahoma.

Fink started as a geographer but soon realized he loved helping other instructors improve their teaching. He founded the Instructional Development Program at OU in 1979. Most of his work these days is traveling the country giving workshops on how to create new college courses using the principles of integrated course design.

It wasn't too long after the conference that I got notice of the publication of his seminal work, Creating Significant Learning Experiences (Jossey-Bass, 2003). As always, the book provides the most in-depth, sophisticated presentation of the ideas. But there are other ways to get the basics including a powerpoint and a web site. A think that probably a close, careful reading of the 34 page A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning is the very best way, short of reading the whole book (which I plan to do this summer). Anyone else up for the challenge ?

I consider myself privileged to serve on the Core Curriculum Committee charged with the design of the new Learning Frameworks class to begin in 2010. I think The Self-Directed Guide provides the best road map I've seen for creating a class that can be "truly significant" in the DCCCD.