I try to write all of these blog essays myself. However, a good friend of mine, James Lang at Assumption College, has just published a new book (Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty) that I think is excellent and innovative and I wanted to recommend that you consider reading it. (Here, in the name of full disclosure, I will admit that he includes a couple of pages on my approach to teaching but that is only a very small part of the book.)
On his own blog, Jim posted the following
description of the book. I thought he
did a great job of explaining what he had done. So, I am simply including his words
directly. If you are looking for a
thoughtful book on teaching and education, I think this is a great choice.
**
By James Lang:
Just around two years ago, the editor of my last book with Harvard University Press told me that she
had been to a conference about teaching in higher education and heard a lot of
discussion about the problem of cheating on campus. Everyone was looking for
solutions. She wondered whether I might have an interest in tackling the
problem in a book for the Press.
I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but you don't get too many offers like this as a writer, so I agreed to think about it. She drove out to Worcester and we had a lovely lunch together at the Sole Proprietor, my favorite seafood restaurant. By the end of the conversation, I was convinced enough to at least do some reading and put together a proposal. I went to the local public library, checked out three books on cheating, and brought them with me on vacation that following week.
After reading them, I had some vague ideas about how I might like to approach the problem, and the book, and so I put together a proposal, which the Press accepted. As I then really dug into the research on cheating over the next few months, I began to see things differently. The more I tried to understand why students were cheating, the more I became convinced that the problem of cheating revealed some fundamental flaws in the ways we structured and taught courses in higher education. I abandoned the structure of my initial proposal and struck out in an entirely new direction.
By the spring of 2012, I had settled on my approach to the issue, which was to argue that research on human learning and research on cheating were both pointing us in the same direction in terms of how we should be designing and teaching our courses, and so the heart of the book became an argument about how we can learn from academic dishonesty how to build better learning environments. Christopher Hager, a Trinity College professor who read an advanced copy, captured this well with his very kind blurb for the book: "James Lang has written a smart, original, well-researched guide to 'building better learning environments' framed as a guide to avoiding academic dishonesty."
The heart of the book, then, is essentially an argument for how we can teach our students more effectively--and, in doing so, reduce their incentive and opportunity to cheat. Around that basic argument are two shorter sections: first, a brief tour through the history of cheating, both in higher education and beyond, as well as an overview of the statistics on cheating in higher education today; and, in the final part of the book, some arguments about how and why we should tackle the problem of cheating from the broader campus perspective.
So if you have any interest whatsoever in the question of why students cheat, or how they do it, or what to do about it, you should buy this book! But I hope the book will appeal to all teachers, even those who teach at the secondary and elementary levels, as it also reviews recent research in learning theory and uses that material to make the case for how we should be building learning environments for all of our students. Finally, if you are interested more broadly in the present and future state of higher education, I hope and think you will find the book of interest, as it explores how the root causes of cheating may extend deeply into the structure and nature of the way we do business on campus.
In any case, that's the story of Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty.
I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but you don't get too many offers like this as a writer, so I agreed to think about it. She drove out to Worcester and we had a lovely lunch together at the Sole Proprietor, my favorite seafood restaurant. By the end of the conversation, I was convinced enough to at least do some reading and put together a proposal. I went to the local public library, checked out three books on cheating, and brought them with me on vacation that following week.
After reading them, I had some vague ideas about how I might like to approach the problem, and the book, and so I put together a proposal, which the Press accepted. As I then really dug into the research on cheating over the next few months, I began to see things differently. The more I tried to understand why students were cheating, the more I became convinced that the problem of cheating revealed some fundamental flaws in the ways we structured and taught courses in higher education. I abandoned the structure of my initial proposal and struck out in an entirely new direction.
By the spring of 2012, I had settled on my approach to the issue, which was to argue that research on human learning and research on cheating were both pointing us in the same direction in terms of how we should be designing and teaching our courses, and so the heart of the book became an argument about how we can learn from academic dishonesty how to build better learning environments. Christopher Hager, a Trinity College professor who read an advanced copy, captured this well with his very kind blurb for the book: "James Lang has written a smart, original, well-researched guide to 'building better learning environments' framed as a guide to avoiding academic dishonesty."
The heart of the book, then, is essentially an argument for how we can teach our students more effectively--and, in doing so, reduce their incentive and opportunity to cheat. Around that basic argument are two shorter sections: first, a brief tour through the history of cheating, both in higher education and beyond, as well as an overview of the statistics on cheating in higher education today; and, in the final part of the book, some arguments about how and why we should tackle the problem of cheating from the broader campus perspective.
So if you have any interest whatsoever in the question of why students cheat, or how they do it, or what to do about it, you should buy this book! But I hope the book will appeal to all teachers, even those who teach at the secondary and elementary levels, as it also reviews recent research in learning theory and uses that material to make the case for how we should be building learning environments for all of our students. Finally, if you are interested more broadly in the present and future state of higher education, I hope and think you will find the book of interest, as it explores how the root causes of cheating may extend deeply into the structure and nature of the way we do business on campus.
In any case, that's the story of Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty.
**
The book is available on Amazon through a
search of the title.
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