As they walked in the door, I told them, very excitedly, that we were going to have a drawing contest. Being the competitive GT kids that they are, they were all super excited, and immediately got to work drawing the best space-scape, plant or structural drawing they could. They were really into it -- hunched over, shielding their amazing, winning drawings from prying eyes.
They had five minutes -- timed. Then I had them trade their drawings with another person, put their names on that person's drawing, and hand them in. This is where it got a little mean."Oh, John!" I exclaimed, looking at Stephanie's drawing. "What color! What imagination!"
"Oh, Gina! What beautifully rendered leaves!" while looking at Maria's drawing.
This garnered predictable results.
"That's not hers -- that's mine!" "I don't like this!" "But, that's mine!"
"But...it has their name on it," I'd reply every time, then picked a "winner." Inevitably the winners felt guilty for being recognized over a picture they hadn't really drawn, and the real "winner" felt extremely irritated.
I debriefed with every group afterwards -- a necessity, because confusion and hurt feelings happened in every class. I apologized, but explained that this was the point -- that your brain is much more likely to remember something it learns when there is a strong emotion attached, and this was a lesson I never wanted them to forget.
Plagiarism -- the bane of every teacher who teaches resarch, from first grade through post-graduate studies. Now my students from ages 7 through 10 have an extremely clear understanding of the issue. We followed up this activity (which I learned from a training this summer in the IIM research method), with a Brainpop video and circle map about plagiarism.We began with the end in mind. I want them to be good researchers for life -- which means confronting the issue of plagiarism now, before bad habits form. A little mean? Yes. Are they better researchers for it? Absolutely.
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