Oh my! Our kids are Cheating online

 Oh My- kids are cheating during online learning

Once we get past the reality that virtual learning is an oxymoron, we might be able to address the problem.

Cheating, as defined in a recent Education Week article, is when kids get help during virtual instruction.  They may get the help from family or friends or other students.  Somehow this is bad.  Some teachers are calling out kids and saying that the students are cheating.  

In the workplace, staff are not expected to do all the problem solving themselves.  In fact, it is considered a great workplace skill if a person knows how to collaborate with colleagues and come up with a solution.

Maybe the problem isn’t that kids “cheat”, but that the kind of learning teachers are asking of kids lends itself to children seeking the one right answer from whatever source is available.

What if teachers stopped asking one right answer questions.  What if they stopped asking multiple choice or true/false questions or questions that asked for the one right answer.  What would happen if teachers took the harder way out and asked questions that required children to not only problem solve but to also require that they collaborate with peers.  With one switch of the question, a child could go from being a cheater to being a problem solver.

In the early days, we had kids write a pledge that said, “I have neither given nor received help during this work”.   I always thought that was pretty stupid.  If you were passing someone else’s work off as your own, what would keep you from not being honest about the pledge?

This switch to online learning could be a wonderful time to get rid of grades.  Teachers (and school districts) like to fool themselves into believing that grades are a precise measurement of what a child has learned.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  What if a teacher asks a child to look at the geography, weather of a state, educational and income levels of the population and based on that information to predict what the economy of that state might look like?   Or, on the other hand, if a teacher asks a child to research the principal products of a state, describe its geographic features, the population and the name of the capital.  Which activity will be less open to “cheating” and more importantly, which activity will require more thinking and problem solving?   Clearly it is the first activity since that requires conjecture on the part of the student and there is no right answer.

It isn’t the kids who are cheating, it is the teachers who are cheating the kids out of productive learning activities.