Teamwork vs. Individual Responsibility
Sunny Hills HS Cheating Incident!
A group of about 20 Sunny Hill High (Fullerton, Calif.) honor-roll students were reprimanded for cheating, when they insist all they did was work in a group (Anderson, L.A. TIMES, 4/11). The paper observes that the incident, which left 13 of the students disbarred from the National Honor Society, “falls precisely at the nexus of two issues on the front lines of teaching”: the trend toward “cooperative learning” and the nationwide crack down on cheating.
“We are sending mixed signals,” said Dennis Evans, head of teacher credentialing at UC Irvine and a former school principal. “Where does collaboration end and cheating begin?” While the Sunny Hill students concede that they were wrong, some did not understand the rules of the project. “Certainly, they took few steps to cover their tracks,” writes the paper.
Their assignment, according to the TIMES, was to outline 10 scientific and philosophical texts. Students in the course called “Theory of Knowledge” divided the work and “shared whole sections of their reports with each other, verbatim,” writes the paper. “We didn’t think it through, this not being a major assignment,” explained one student. “It’s not a test or a term paper or anything like that.”
Patrick Lampman, the teacher for the course, remained firm that “students who work together must share credit together,” reports the paper. Lampman: “What you need to be is very forthright: If you did [the work] with someone else, put both names on it. If your name goes on it, then clearly you’re the one that assumes responsibility for it.” He added that his directions were clear: Students are expected to do their own work unless otherwise told.
Cynthia Martini, a career and academic counselor at Sunny Hill: “It is wrong any time you copy or take something from another student. But students work together all the time That’s the difficulty. Our society says that if you can’t collaborate, you can’t function.
Teachers elsewhere agree that they too face similar dilemmas in classroom teaching — “balancing the twin objectives of student teamwork and individual responsibility,” writes the paper Dan Shepard, a biology teacher at Westminster High School: “That’s the way research is done in real life. Teamwork is important. When all is said and done, they’re going to have the same data. But the discussion of the results should be each kids’ own work. It’s always an effort to encourage them to do that. Obviously, if one kid transcribes another kid’s work. I
can catch it.”
The TIMES notes that the Sunny Hill episode also has political overtone. One professor who asked the paper to remain anonymous explained that some conservatives disparage the academic teamwork model, “saying that public schools fail to put enough emphasis on individual work,” reports the paper. These critics tally episodes of cheating as “evidence of the evils of cooperative learning,” said the professor.
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