February 23, 2015 - 11:35
After the class meeting, the kids take a science test (Ms. Nielsen gives worksheet with questions and reads the questions aloud) and a math test from their workbooks. A few kids look at the paper next to them, ask their neighbors for answers. Some tell Ms. Nielsen that someone else was cheating. Ms. Nielsen says aloud to me, “We have a big cheating problem in this class”. She moves one student over a desk, but otherwise does not punish kids who cheat or try to stop them from doing it.
For context, I’m in a third grade classroom. Ms. Nielsen doesn’t seem to punish kids who act out or commit other infractions like talking over people or running around the room when they should be sitting. I was surprised though that she seemed to brush off the cheating thing so easily. I think being a Haverford student has strongly influenced my understanding of the importance of academic integrity, which skews my perspective a bit and may be why I was surprised by her response. It’s also important to recognize that the kids cheating is not a reflection of either the students’ or the teacher’s moral grounding.
Ms. Nielsen’s general lack of response to the issue leads me to suspect that it may simply be a classroom culture; the students have figured out that they can get away with it, and so it becomes part of the accepted behavior in that particular class. This interaction suggests a lack of the high press-high support environment that Payne talks about. By allowing the cheating to occur, Ms. Nielsen is not communicating that she has high expectations for her students. So maybe the kids cheat because they can get away with it and aren’t held to a higher standard? I can’t really say if this is the case yet though, since I’ve only had one visit. Or maybe they cheat because they lack support, but I also haven’t yet witnessed enough to gauge this aspect of the classroom. I wonder if this problem is unique to this particular class or if it exists in the rest of the school as well. I wonder at when the kids started to cheat. I wonder how this sort of classroom culture might affect the students in the future.