Teaching Academic Integrity

Focus on building and strengthening the classroom community. Faculty can support student learning by creating spaces for students to take risks, ask questions, and explore course content in a meaningful way. By cultivating a culture of curiosity, inquiry, reflection, and discernment, you can enhance students’ intrinsic motivation and investment in the course material. 

• In the early days of your course, review your expectations of learning and offer multiple modalities for engaging with course material.
• Ground your teaching practice in care for the whole person – how you show up in space and invite others to join the classroom community is essential for creating a supportive learning environment.
• Highlight your commitment to student wellness; academic integrity issues can result from students feeling stressed, overwhelmed, unmotivated, and stuck (Tindall, et al., 2021).

A strong classroom community can help mitigate some academic integrity issues as students share their struggles, find peer and university support, and talk to their instructor. The bottom line is to create a learner-oriented environment.

Changing mindsets can help all of us reframe academic integrity. Rather than focusing on punitive actions or discourses, consider how teaching academic integrity can support students’ intellectual, ethical, and professional development. Here are some strategies to make this an ongoing conversation:

• Talk about your syllabus statements throughout the course. Syllabus statements should be revisited at key moments in your teaching, such as when you are reviewing assignments and grading practices. Check out our Talking About Syllabus Statements DRT page.
• Engage students in a class activity grappling with issues related to academic integrity
• Include a short in-class tutorial on how to cite and document sources properly, including in relation to when and how credit should be given for an idea, paraphrase, or direct quotation. This is especially important in relation to citing AI tools students may be using in different stages of their learning process.
• Create sample AI ‘Do’s and Don’ts’. Ask students to determine whether particular examples fall into the ‘Do’ or ‘Don’t’ category and to explain why they chose that category.
• Create sample assignment or assessment scenarios where a fictional student uses AI at different steps in their learning process. Ask students to discuss how and when they should cite their use of AI. 
• In scenarios like group work, where credit can be sticky, engage students in advanced planning and documentation about what individuals’ roles will be.

Emphasize the resources and peer support available at the HUB Writing Center and other university services such as the Drahmann Advising and Learning Resource Center and the Wellness Center. Talking about these resources in class a couple of times over the course of the term - especially at high stakes moments in the class - can help students find help and normalize asking for support.