Teaching Academic Honesty in the School Library

Posted on March 29, 2024 by Barbara Paciotti

Plagiarism. A “hot” word when teachers assign a research project to students. College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards refer to plagiarism, and Common Core State Standards refer to plagiarism and bibliographic citation, so students invariably get a (boring) lesson about these topics when they begin research.

Unfortunately, those topics relate only to documentation, so that is typically all that teachers teach. However, according to the AASL National School Library Standards, School Librarians are charged with teaching a much wider range of concepts:

VI.A. The school library serves as a context in which the school librarian ensures that the school community is aware of the guidelines for safe, ethical, and legal use of information by:
- 1. Educating the school community on the ethical use of information and the intellectual property of others.
- 3. Embedding legal, ethical, and social responsibility concepts into the inquiry and information seeking processes.

So, School Librarians provide students with a deep conceptual understanding of intellectual property, copyright, and Fair Use, and we need to make them the key points of our Library Research Lessons.

POSITIVE RESPONSIBILITY & SHORT LESSONS WITH SKILLS

I decided early on to approach these lessons with a positive responsibility focus, teaching students what TO DO rather than talking at them about what not to do. Thus, I chose the overriding concept of Academic Honesty on which to base my lessons. That decision has proven very successful with my middle school students—because I encourage them to be trustworthy, they rise to that expectation.

I’m a proponent of short, simple, relevant lessons that teach only what students need to perform the task at hand. Since we don’t expect a research assignment to be completed in a single day, Academic Honesty lessons can be spread out over the first few days of research to keep them very short and allow time for students to do their actual research. Each of my lessons follows a natural conceptual progression, from intellectual property, to copyright and Fair Use, then to public domain, and finally to plagiarism.

As teachers, we School Librarians know that students learn best when content and skills are taught in context. Each Academic Honesty lesson teaches a required documentation skill with its related concept and gives students time to apply them to a research activity. This is another smooth transition as students learn bibliographic citation, then in-document citation with notetaking, then citation of images and other non-text media.

A POSITIVE FOCUS ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

You may wonder why I begin with Intellectual Property and bibliographic citation of sources.

Intellectual property is the overriding concept from which copyright, public domain, fair use, and plagiarism stem.
Bibliographic citation needs to be the first thing students do with a source, because too often they forget to record the source and then can’t remember where they found information, either to return to it or to create their bibliography.

The positive focus is that giving someone credit for their intellectual property by citing them is the right thing to do. And I let students know that their products are their own intellectual property…and they certainly want credit for the work that they do!

COPYRIGHT & 3 METHODS OF NOTETAKING

The second Academic Honesty lesson transitions into the concept of Copyright & Fair Use, focusing on the legal rights conveyed to owners of intellectual property. During the lesson I use a 3-minute Common Sense Media video about Fair Use because I want students to understand why they can legally use other people’s copyrighted intellectual property for their school assignment. They need to understand this in order to know the difference between the 3 methods of note-taking from textual material: by quoting, by paraphrasing, and by summarizing.

I firmly believe if we take more time teaching and modeling note-taking with students, so they really learn and understand the 3 types, then we wouldn’t need to admonish them about plagiaristic writing. Quoting is usually well understood by older students, but I model an example to review it and explain how to include an in-line citation.

When I taught high school science, I was surprised how many students didn’t understand paraphrasing nor how to do it. Evidently this is a critical Information Literacy skill that we need to address earlier in their schooling as students begin gathering textual information. I spend time with students modeling how to paraphrase a short selection of text, and then helping them see that paraphrasing is still using someone else’s copyrighted intellectual property, so they need to cite the source in-line when they include the paraphrased material in their end product.

Summarizing is often the lowest score on our State Reading Test, so after modeling an easy way to do it, a guided practice activity has students paraphrase and summarize excerpts from the Declaration of Independence and 3 famous Presidential speeches.

Once students understand how note-taking relates to intellectual property and copyright, the third Academic Honesty lesson is about Public Domain & Creative Commons where the practice activity focuses on how to use images and other non-text media from these sources. I re-emphasize Academic Honesty and that they continue to use in-document and bibliographic citation for information or media that isn’t theirs—it’s still someone else’s original intellectual creation.

DON’T “DIS” HONESTY

Once students learn the “honest” practices, the last lesson, Academic Honesty and Plagiarism, explains that presenting someone else’s ideas, expressions, or creative work as your own is unethical. It’s an academically DIS-honest practice called plagiarism—and we all know it’s poor form to “dis” someone!

I find that discussing consequences of plagiarism is unproductive. Most students are eager to do what’s right, but a few would waste time on minutiae just to see what I’ll say. So when someone asks “What happens if I plagiarize?” I ask these questions back:

Why do it wrong and then have to do it over?
Why risk a teacher’s ill will and a bad grade when it’s so easy to do it right?
Why not learn the right way now, when doing it wrong later on can endanger your entire future in college or a career?

I tell them, the only question I’ll answer is one about true learning, as in, “How do I properly express my knowledge?”

Lest you think my Academic Honesty unit sounds like a long drawn-out process, each lesson has fewer than a dozen slides as a brief beginning for the class period. Throughout the year I can use the short lessons to review pertinent concepts for a particular assignment. I’m not sure if my positive spin produces better student products, but I do know that students come away with a much more optimistic outlook about doing their research projects.

SOLVING THE PLAGIARISM PROBLEM

My big concern about plagiarism is that we educators may be the problem. How can we discourage kids from plagiarizing when we offer them no opportunity for their own original expressions? When a teacher comes to us about resources for a student research project and we see that it’s low-level Bloom, just begging to be copied from an encyclopedia or a 3^rd grader’s website, we, as the School Librarian, can diplomatically suggest ways to rework the topic so it requires more in-depth research, more higher-level thinking skills, and a genuine expression of a student’s own ideas and conclusions.

Here’s an example. A 7th grade research project asks students to choose one Greek or Roman god or goddess, research their attributes from a couple books and websites, then create a written paper or a PowerPoint of the information. Ho Hum…I’m yawning and so will they.

My suggestion: compare a Greek/Roman god/goddess with a current popular star from TV/film/music/sports, explain the key attributes they share, and give an opinion on why these two were/are idolized. Every kid has a favorite star, someone they seek to emulate, and this assignment helps them examine the qualities they admire in this person and whether they really do want to be like them. They need to examine several Greek or Roman deities to decide who to compare, a more demanding analysis than the original assignment, and the compare/contrast with past and present can open their eyes to the human need to look outside ourselves for help in coping with life. Now how could anyone plagiarize that?

You can find these Academic Honesty Lessons in my No Sweat Library store on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Post updated from 2016.

Do We Teach Dewey … or Don’t We? A School Library Lesson

Posted on November 6, 2023 by Barbara Paciotti

I don’t teach the Dewey Decimal Classification System during Library Orientation. In fact, I don’t teach it at all!

The eye-opener came my second year as a librarian when I was telling students (during an incredibly boring orientation) that library books were originally shelved behind the circulation desk, and the DDC was created so librarians could organize books to find one when a patron asked for it. I suddenly realized that the DDC is for me to know for organizing books, not for students to know for finding one.

Students only need to know how to find a number on a shelf, and anyone who can put 3 or 4 numbers in consecutive order can do that—even a kindergartner!

CAN I JUSTIFY NOT TEACHING DEWEY?

Few School Librarians understand “Classes” and “Divisions” of DDC, or what it means that DDC organizes those Classes & Divisions by discipline. While the 10 Classes are pretty easy to remember, most School Librarians know only a few Dewey Divisions. Quick: name the 10 Divisions of the 700s Arts & Leisure. And that’s an easy one! If we School Librarians don’t even know the DDCS, why should a kid?

Secondly, the AASL National School Library Standards never mention the Dewey Decimal Classification System. (Nor did the Standards for a 21st Century Learner!) It’s not even listed in the Glossary or the Index. It’s only at the School Library level that there’s a hint at a classification system:

IV. CURATE C. SHARE 2. The school library facilitates the contribution and exchange within and among learning communities by including and tracking collection materials in a system that uses standardized approaches to description & location. (p.62)

As for School Librarians, there’s not even a hint at a classification system; this is as close as they get:

IV. CURATE A. THINK 2. School librarians challenge learners to act on an information need by designing opportunities for learners to explore possible information sources. (p. 50)

I particularly like the wording “opportunities for learners to explore,” and I’ve written about such opportunities for Science and for Social Studies that coordinates both the discipline of Dewey and classroom learning.

So, if our own Standards don’t specify the DDCS for us or for learners, we don’t need to teach Dewey!

Finally, the trend in education is away from content-based instruction and toward developing critical-thinking through inquiry and problem-solving. The school library is all about inquiry and problem-solving, so why would we continue to teach a content-based lesson on the Dewey Decimal Classification System?

WHAT TO TEACH INSTEAD OF DEWEY

As School Librarians, our main concern is about helping students learn how to use an organization system to locate resources. Thus, we teach students about our online catalog, and that, after using it to identify whether the school library has a book, they only need a number to find the book on the shelf.

This goes beyond just a lesson; it touches on the latest trend of dumping Dewey for a “kid-friendly” word-based system. I’m astonished when I hear this, since Dewey is itself a short, simple notation for locating a book on the shelf. I doubt that kids are any more likely to “learn” letter acronyms than Dewey numbers.

They’ll still have to search By Subject, we’ll still have to teach them how to use the system to find a book, and we’ll still need to put signs on the shelves, all of which we can do just as easily with Dewey numbers!

NoSweat Library Dewey Decimal Library Lesson presentation slide - They rarely visit the library, so a Dewey Decimal lesson gives Math classes a curricular reason to visit the library, especially if we offer a practical, hands-on application of decimal concepts.

A slide about place value from my math lessons.

Students do need to understand that each place value in a Dewey decimal number stands for a more specific subject or topic, so more decimals mean a narrower topic of a book. What those subjects or topics are should be a sign on a shelf, not a scrap of trivia in a kid’s brain.

Granted, for elementary students, especially very young ones who haven’t learned about decimals, Dewey numbers may seem a bit daunting, but even a kindergartner quickly learns to count to 100, and helping kids discern and practice numerical order is a more important skill to focus on than what the numbers stand for.

It’s incredible that many of my middle schoolers can’t do this, so a lesson activity that sends kids off to find books by number is not only a better strategy for the library—and for reinforcing Math skills—but it’s a lot more fun! At least it always is for my students since I changed my lessons from content to process!

DO DEWEY WITH MATH CLASSES!

I suggest that our reluctance to focus on number location is due to math anxiety—after all, most librarians seem to come from a language arts background, not a math one. But think about it: Numbers and decimals are part of the math curriculum, so why not bring in math classes for a Dewey lesson? They rarely use the library, so a Dewey Decimal lesson gives Math classes a curricular reason to visit the school library, especially when we offer a practical, hands-on application of decimal concepts. And it certainly answers the common question in math about “When are we ever going to use this?”

Thanks to a suggestion from my library colleague, Cindy Nietubicz, I bring both 6^th and 7^th grade Math classes into the library for a Dewey Decimal Lesson. The timing is perfect for us—these math classes begin decimal units about 5 weeks into the school year, when our ELA fiction reading pattern is well established and students are eager to check out Dewey books.

My math lessons serve to activate prior math knowledge about what students should already know about decimals, so it prepares them for their upcoming unit. With 6g students we review place values and sequencing decimals; with 7g students we review adding and subtracting decimals. Students practice how decimals are used in the library by locating Dewey-decimal-number books on the shelf. Math teachers like having this fun, non-graded review where they can see which students are having trouble with decimals.

Animated lesson slide for students to practice putting decimals in order.

After the practice activity, students have plenty of time to browse for Dewey books to check out. Many get an interesting book they find during the activity. Others are stimulated to use my signage to find Dewey numbers of their favorite topics. When students are seated, we follow the same silent reading and invited checkout procedure that we use for ELA classes.

Math teachers love these lessons so much that they come to me early in the school year to see when we can schedule them into the library. It also whets their interest in collaborating on other math-related lessons in the library. Students love these lessons, too. Sixth graders are always puzzled about why they’re in the library with a math class…most have never done that before. What amazes me is how many comment afterward that now they understand how all those numbers work, which is, of course, the whole point of teaching Dewey numbers to our students.

WHY DO I SAY “DEWEY NUMBERS”?

You may be wondering why I deliberately use the phrase Dewey numbers—and Dewey books. I identify areas of the library by what’s on the spine labels of the books; since there’s a Dewey number on the spine labels, it’s the Dewey area of the library.

My decision to begin doing this came during the aforementioned (incredibly boring) orientation: I was explaining that we separate fiction books from the 800s into their own area of the library, but the ‘non-fiction’ area still had some fictional books, such as aliens and fairy tales. I thought, “Why am I making this so confusing to students? If I just call them Dewey-number books I’ll alleviate confusion and questions!” So from then on, that’s what I called them.

Now I clarify with students that ‘non-fiction’ is about the content of a book, not it’s location. If you take anything from this blog post, I hope it’s the terms ‘Dewey area’ and ‘Dewey-number books’ instead of ‘nonfiction.’ Our kids deserve common sense.

If the slide images above have sparked your interest, you can find my Dewey Lessons in my No Sweat Library store on TeachersPayTeachers, as well as my colorful Dewey Subject Signs & Shelf Labels.

Make your Dewey Decimal Library Lesson more authentic and relevant by inviting 6g Math classes to review decimal place values and sequencing! Students & teachers love this Library Lesson that activates prior knowledge at the beginning of their 6g Math decimal unit. Do this lesson, and your math teachers will come to you every year asking when you'll schedule their visit!

Make your Dewey Decimal Library Lesson more authentic & relevant by inviting 7g Math classes to review adding & subtracting decimal numbers! Students & teachers love this Library Lesson that activates prior knowledge at the beginning of their 7g Math decimal unit. Do this lesson, and your math teachers will come to you every year asking when you'll schedule their visit!

No Sweat Library Dewey Subject Signs & Shelf Labels - Make it easier for students to find a Dewey book in your school library with these colorful, pictorial signs and shelf labels. They're just what you need for your middle school or elementary library!

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Category Archives: SLIS as Experienced Teacher