One way I will be using this blog is to seek opinions and insights from other educators!
Today, a teacher came to me with an interesting question: What do you do when a student in your class completely plagiarizes the class shared story for his own independent writing piece and is not owning up to it in any way? Do you let it go, or bring it to his attention and require that he start a new piece?
I know how I answered this teacher's question but would love to hear how you would answer it! Respond with your thoughts!
Always compliment: "Wow so and so, I'm so impressed with how you are really using our class story to help make your own writing stronger. But today I want to show you how writers use each other's ideas, rather than take each other's ideas."
ReplyDeleteThen: I would make the writer confirm that yes, indeed, he too had been to the beach and had an umbrella topple over, or whatever the story was about. Even if I thought he was lying, I'd let it go. This is clearly a writer who struggles with topic choice, and I want to support him in getting ideas from other writers - just steer him towards making them more his own.
After that, I'd point out whichever strategy he seems to be using the most/is the most comfortable with - dialogue, showing feelings, whatever it is - and explicitly point to where he "took" from the class story rather than "used" the same strategy. I would push him to think like this "I want to use dialogue (or whatever strategy) just like the class story. That's great. But what do the people in MY memory say?" And then coach him through putting in his original dialogue into the story.
That was really long winded...I need a conference about summing up my ideas.