Are you tired of seeing plagiarism when your students submit their writing? If you’re like me, my students claim that they “didn’t mean to plagiarize.” It’s often hard for me to believe that they do not know that copying and pasting is basically stealing, buttttt I try to be kind and give them the benefit of the doubt. 😂 I’ve found that teaching high school students how to avoid plagiarism isn’t easy, but it is SO necessary.
Over the last few semesters, I have greatly reduced plagiarism issues in my classes because I explicitly teach my high school students what plagiarism is and how to avoid plagiarism.
I start out every semester for all of my classes – from freshmen to seniors – in the same way. Following these 3 simple steps at the beginning of each semester has made me wayyyy less salty when I grade writing because I see original work. Of course, I still get the occasional red flag of plagiarism, but as a whole, following these 3 steps to reduce plagiarism in the high school English classroom has made my grading life much easier.
Step 1: Explicitly teach what plagiarism is and what it looks like in actual student writing.
Okay, stay with me here. Of course, we may automatically know what plagiarism is and why we shouldn’t do it. However, many of our students have grown up in the age of copying and pasting and they do not understand why it is an issue.
Many students do not understand that there is more than one way to plagiarize something, so I begin by explicitly teaching high school students how to avoid plagiarism by showing them the 4 types of plagiarism that I see the most in the classroom:
- The “Clone” – they copy everyyyy single word from a site like Enotes.com or Sparknotes.com
- The “Remix” – they copy things from several sources and paste them together to look like it came from their own brains
- The “Control + C” – they copy a few things and sprinkle them in with some of their own work
- The “Switcharoo” – they copy from a website, then use thesaurus.com to change a few keywords in the hope that I won’t notice
I found that my students were telling me that they did not plagiarize, but only because they did not understand what plagiarism looked like. Once I show them examples of plagiarism in student writing, they started to see plagiarism problems within their own work. I try and show them multiple examples of what each type of plagiarism may look like in a student’s paper. Once they see it in “real life,” they start to understand what they cannot do in their own work.
Step 2: Teach them how simple it is to cite things and avoid getting flagged for plagiarism.
Once I started realizing that some of the students were not plagiarizing to cheat, but rather didn’t understand how to properly cite things, I realized that I was dealing with a fresh set of problems. While I once thought that they were cheating by plagiarizing, I realized that most of them just did not know how to cite, or even how to talk about, textual evidence.
***Check out my fav. mini-lesson that includes this exercise here!***
I not only teach my students how to properly cite direct quotes AND paraphrases (don’t get me started on how they think paraphrasing isn’t plagiarism…), I noticed a huge decrease in plagiarism issues. I found that teaching high school students how to properly cite things isn’t always easy. However, most of them tend to make it harder than it really is (don’t we all do this! Ugh!) – so I made them a handy cheat sheet to use. Once they had the cheat sheet to glue in their notebooks or bookmark on Google Chrome, they started trying to cite things. While it wasn’t always perfect, especially at first, I saw that they were trying to properly cite in order to avoid plagiarism. AND I APPLAUDED THEIR EFFORTS SO.FREAKING.LOUDLY.
While teaching them how to properly cite textual evidence drastically cut down on the plagiarized material they were turning in, I also noticed that many of them were citing the text, but then weren’t sure how to talk about the text without further copying/pasting. I decided it was time to pull out my secret weapon – one simple phrase:
This shows that…
I tell my students to use the phrase “This shows that…” after a piece of textual evidence in order to get their minds thinking about what the piece from a text MEANS, what it MEANS to THEM, and HOW it contributes to THEIR overarching idea. While using “this shows that…” becomes repetitive, I tell them to simply erase “this shows that…” after they finish their sentence – and they’ll still have a complete sentence!
Example: This shows that the author wants the audience to focus on the negative characteristics and start to doubt the speaker’s credibility.
If we remove the phrase “This shows that…” we still have a complete sentence: The author wants the audience to focus on the negative characteristics and start to doubt the speaker’s credibility.
This simple exercise helps the students to shift their mindset from copying/pasting to mindfully writing what they observe or think about the text.
Step 3: Let them search for plagiarism in a paper – and correct it!
As the final step in teaching my high school students how to avoid plagiarism, I give them an article to read. After they read the article, I offer them a simple prompt like: What is the central idea of the article? Then, I’ll provide them with a few pre-written responses to the prompt (these are typically just a few sentences, so I’ll type them up myself). Some of the pre-written responses will include plagiarism, and others will not. I ask my students to first pick out which pieces are copied and pasted directly. Then, I’ll ask them to find paraphrases that are plagiarized. We’ll go over how to fix these forms of plagiarism together.
We’ll then practice this again with a multiple choice exercise where they choose which response is correct and which one contains plagiarism. Lastly, I’ll have them use their cheat sheets to practice responding to a prompt about the article on their own. I require them to properly use and cite at least one direct quote and one paraphrased piece from the text. While teaching high school students how to avoid plagiarism, I’ve found that it’s really important for them to be able to pick it out of writing samples – if they can find it, they can avoid it!
While this three-step process does not stop every incident of plagiarism in my high school classes, it does give my students a better idea of what’s expected of them, and how to actually avoid plagiarism. In the past, I found myself frustrated that they were plagiarizing, but I spent most of my time giving zeros and calling parents rather than showing them ways to fix the issue. Now, I begin every.single.semester with these 3 steps to reduce plagiarism in the high school English classroom so it can be fresh in their minds and (hopefully) stick with them as they start to tackle larger assignments and have more autonomy in their writing assignments.
I’d love to hear more about your fav. Tips and tricks for helping students to avoid plagiarism and be better writers!
