Teaching Creativity: 4 Ideas Every Subject Can Use

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Subscribe to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast and Cool Cat Teacher Talk anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Creativity can be nurtured and grown and should be in every subject, particularly now when creativity is such a competitive advantage. Today’s guest, Susan M. Riley, shares how we can bring creativity into every classroom and gives specific examples for math, science, and engineering. Susan is the author of the book Creativity’s Edge.

Susan argues that creativity shouldn’t be quarantined to one part of the building. Susan shares four branches of creativity and gives concrete examples subject by subject. Math. Science. Engineering. Then, she gives us teachers encouragement to add some creativity into our own days. (I know it is hard when you’re so busy, but I know when I have done this, it has helped me.) So, let’s talk about building our edge with creativity and get some ideas for pulling it into our own classes.

SPONSORED: Experience AI, a free program co-founded by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored this episode. All opinions are my own and that of the guest.

Experience AI is a free AI literacy program with ready to teach lessons for ages 8 to 16. The lessons are written for teachers of all subjects including: science, math, social studies, English, and art and some don’t even need a computer to use. Support your students to become critical thinkers and better understand AI technologies today. Explore the free resources at Experience AI.

See Experience AI’s Free Lesson Plans

When AI can do everything for us, what else is left? Everything that matters.

Susan M. Riley, founder of The Institute for Arts Integration & STEAM

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Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Creativity’s Edge: Unleashing Humanity’s Greatest Advantage in the Age of AI by Susan M. Riley — the book behind this conversation. It is where the four branches get worked out with practices and ways to measure growth, K-12 and beyond.
• The Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM — Susan’s organization, and the place to go for lesson plans, certification, and training if this episode gave you an idea you want to actually build.
• Art Works for Teachers — Susan’s podcast. Each episode comes in audio, video, and written form with a downloadable resource, which is unusually generous.
• SusanMRiley.com — her author site.
• The National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) — the museum in New York that Susan mentions, dedicated to exactly the art-and-math overlap she describes. If you are ever in the city with a math teacher, go.
• The Desmos Math Art Contest — open each year to students ages 13–18. This is the kind of project I describe on the show, where students build a picture entirely out of the equations of its lines.

Two things to try this week — one for your students, one for you.

Consider “hard fun” creative projects in the projects you give them for their subject. Reflect on what you’re asking students to do and count to ten past when you want to step in and let them have a little bit of struggle so they can create and invent.

And here is one for you, not for your students.

Schedule a 5-minute creativity moment for yourself this week to create something. I have a planner that I put stickers in and print out photos from a small printer and put it in my planner. It is a creative outlet for me. Find a creative outlet for yourself. If you like to sing, sing a favorite song in the car. If you like to draw, take a moment to doodle. Pull something into your day that is creative, even if it is a creative moment in your lesson. See how it makes you feel and see if you want to try it the next day as well. Let me know what you think.

About Susan M. Riley

Susan M. Riley

Susan M. Riley is the Founder of The Institute for Arts Integration & STEAM and host of the Art Works for Teachers podcast. A former music educator with more than two decades of leadership in creative curriculum design, she helps schools build innovative, student-centered learning environments. Riley’s work has been featured by Edutopia, Education Week, and ASCD, and her resources reach millions of educators each year. Her new book, Creativity’s Edge, explores why creativity is the defining skill of the AI era – and how educators and leaders can cultivate it with purpose. She lives in the mid-Atlantic with her family.

Connect with Susan: The Institute for Arts Integration & STEAM | SusanMRiley.com | LinkedIn | Facebook

Other Shows on Creativity and the Arts

• AI Art in the Classroom with Tim Needles — the closest companion to this episode. Tim makes the same argument Susan does, that creativity is a skill you build rather than a trait you have, and he does it from inside an art room that uses AI tools.
• AI as a Creativity Amplifier with Dr. Sarah Thomas — on AI giving teachers back the time to do the work only humans can do, plus the student data guardrails you need first.
• What AI Can’t Do: Being Beautifully Human — my own take on the same question Susan opens with. If today’s episode landed, this is the next one.

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If this one gave you something to try on Monday, share it with the teacher across the hall.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

Vicki Davis (00:00): Happy Motivational Monday. This is episode 980, and we’re talking about creativity. I hope that today you will create before you consume, make something before you check email, and give your students the same rule. They make something before they open a device. Give them what our guest today calls hard fun, a challenge just past the edge of easy. And then find your own creative access point.

Whether it’s singing in the car, journaling, whatever it is, and take 10 minutes a day. Creativity is especially important in the age of AI.

Vicki Davis (00:44): Today’s show is sponsored by Experience AI, the free AI literacy program from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, co-founded with Google DeepMind. Stay to the end. I’ll share how you can start teaching AI literacy in your classroom with confidence. No experience required.

Vicki Davis (01:01): Today we’re talking with Susan M. Riley. She is a former music teacher and the founder of the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM, where she has spent more than two decades helping schools move beyond rigid content silos and into innovative student-centered classrooms. She is the host of Art Works for Teachers podcast and author of the new book, Creativity’s Edge.

So in this book, she gives educators practical ways to use creativity as a hidden advantage in an AI driven world. Her work is featured by Edutopia, Education Week, and ASCD. And she now reaches millions of teachers looking for fresh doable ideas they can use tomorrow.

So Susan, a sentence or two, how would you explain to a tired classroom teacher why creativity is not just one more thing, but it’s actually our greatest advantage in the age of AI?

Susan Riley (01:55): When AI can do everything for us, what else is left? Everything that matters. The things that matter most are creativity. The things that we need to teach our students to be able to think and do and be curious and create are the things that AI can’t do. And so in a future that is unknown, I am a true believer that creativity is the thing that’s gonna set us apart.

Vicki Davis (02:15): You know, my students are very often nervous about — are we going tomorrow? Will I have a job? And I say, okay, if you learn how to think, if you learn how to be creative, if you learn to get along with other people, those are things no machine will ever be able to do. And they become even more important in the classroom. But you’re not just talking the art classroom, you’re talking math and science and all these other subjects. So what are some of the ideas you give all these different subjects for integrating creativity into their lessons? Like math — math teachers are [going] to go, really, Susan?

Susan Riley (02:48): I know, but you know what? Math is where some of the best creative ideas come from, especially for students who struggle in math. Those students like me — I’m one of those people that believes that letters should not be with numbers. That’s just not right. So algebra was never my thing.

Susan Riley (03:03): When you encourage creative problem solving, that is creativity being worked through in a math class. And so when we’re looking at creativity, it’s not just skills of creativity. There’s lots of different ways that people can be creative. In fact, I call it the four branches of creativity. We have skills, that we can work on in the art classroom, but then there’s also application. And so looking at how do we pair maybe math and music together to learn fractions — it makes a beautiful pairing, but we have to be intentional about it. That’s application of creativity. Then we’ve got creative thinking. And then the last branch is creative expression. So how do we interpret what we’re feeling, what we’re seeing, who we are in a creative way.

Creativity doesn’t just live [in] isolation. It lives all around us. And so it’s learning how to leverage that [in the] classroom or content that we’re teaching.

Vicki Davis (03:54): I know our school, for calculus, one of their favorite projects they do in Desmos where they create art and they have all of the equations of all the lines that comes out of Desmos. And that’s a creativity project. And most people would say, hey, if you want to meet those standards, you don’t have time for art. But art is really part of everything because it’s part of human expression, isn’t it?

Susan Riley (04:15): Absolutely. There’s a whole museum dedicated to art and math called Museum of Math up in New York. [If] you’ve never been, go. It has all kinds of projects just like what you described. And its whole goal is to showcase — there’s creativity embedded within our human experience. And so how that comes out can be expressed in a lot of different ways.

Vicki Davis (04:35): Okay, so how about art and engineering? Do you have anything there?

Susan Riley (04:38): Absolutely. So when we’re thinking about engineering, I often think about Alexander Calder as an artist who created kinetic sculptures. How do you create something that moves and is also a piece of art, and what qualifies as art, and taking a look at those pieces and trying to pull them together? Engineering is also about the problem solving, that process, the engineering process that’s embedded into STEAM significantly. [You can] leverage not just visual art, but we could look at music or theater or dance.

Dance is a great way to connect with engineering, looking at how different choreography components pull together. It’s just a matter of shifting our lens just slightly to take a look at our content in maybe a different way than we’ve thought of before.

Vicki Davis (05:18): So let’s shift — science and creativity?

Susan Riley (05:21): Science has a lot of natural pairings, particularly when we’re looking at both movement, if we’re looking at dance, as well as visual art. Think about when you’re looking at developing colors and color theory — there’s a lot that has to go into exactly how many of each color would work together to create a purple or a violet, and documenting that process. I’ve done that with students before when we’ve looked at making their own fragrances.

We actually brought the experience of making a fragrance from Italy. We had a partner from Italy come in and share, like, here’s how perfumery factories actually look at the science of smell and what it is that attracts people one way or the other to one scent or another. And then how do you create that kind of a scent? It is an art and a science of being able to pull them together.

Vicki Davis (06:10): So Susan, in Creativity’s Edge, you talk about creative abilities that AI can’t touch, like finding problems worth solving and linking ideas in new ways. So how can we as educators intentionally design activities that build those muscles inside our students’ thinking process?

Susan Riley (06:29): Yeah, I think it goes back to looking at those four branches of creativity. [I] would love every school to have access to just dedicated arts programs so that they can teach those dedicated art skills. That’s not possible always, but it’s certainly one branch of it. In classrooms, what I’d love to see is when we’re focusing on creative thinking, particularly around developing skills, around lateral, convergent, and divergent thinking —

being able to provide opportunities for students to have what I call hard fun. Give them a challenge that is right on that edge of not quite too hard, right? You don’t want them to be too far ahead, that’s frustrating, but that raises the bar, that encourages them to push beyond what they thought they might be capable of — and then step back.

Vicki Davis (07:14): You talk a lot about filling your own creative cup. For me, I write. What are some sustainable ways teachers can reclaim their own creativity without feeling like it’s just more homework?

Susan Riley (07:25): That’s the key. Everybody has what I call a creative access point. You might not be the best singer in the world. You might not be on a stage, but you can rock it out in the shower or in the car, right? That’s your jam.

Susan Riley (07:35): Or maybe when you go to a museum, it’s like magic just starts to appear and you feel like at home in that place. When you want to fill your creative cup, you got to recognize — what is it that lights you up?

Figure out what that is. And once you know what that is, don’t let it be a burden. Allow it to be this kind of place that you go in order to feel like you’re coming home. Once you find what it is, ensuring that you carve out a little bit of time for yourself every day to practice it. Creativity is a practice. It’s not something that just [stays] stagnant. We can’t encourage creativity if we’re not practicing [it] in ourselves, and being willing to be open to the process, being willing to fail at the things that we’re trying

and learning from them, and being open to leaning into that. And so it doesn’t have to be, you know, a class every week that you have to go to, or this one particular thinking routine that you always have to do. Find the thing that lights you up. Give yourself permission to play with it

a little bit every day if you can. If not, set aside some time during your week — something that you commit to that fills you and allows you to see the world in a different way, or see the world the way that you want to see it. Express yourself. Join a choir. Go do something that builds that. Take a walk and listen to something that you really enjoy and then maybe journal about it when you get home. Something that allows you to participate in the process.

Vicki Davis (08:59): There’s so many ideas I’ve gotten into. Writing the notes — I like to write people in calligraphy and sealing it with a wax seal. That’s so much fun. My mom, in one season of her life, she always liked to walk at the farm and create a feather collection and was always looking for new feathers. And I know people who have done pressed flowers and play the piano or just tinker with an instrument. There’s so many ways to be

just creative and keep that part of our brain, because it does spill over into other areas — as well as just recognizing beauty. I believe [it] makes us happier, because we’re kind of wired to notice beauty. And sometimes there’s just beauty in this little wildflower that jumped up.

I love your message about creativity and humanity and the place it has in our classrooms, because here’s the thing — don’t you think that STEAM powered projects, science, technology, engineering, arts and math, that really pull the arts in, give kids a real meaning and a purpose to want to come to school? I mean, who talks about a test as a great memory of school? It’s always the projects.

Susan Riley (10:15): One of the hallmarks of the research that we know about arts integration and STEAM is that when it’s embraced and brought in intentionally and we’re being thoughtful about it, we see attendance increase. Discipline issues decrease significantly — we’re talking five, ten percent. That’s a big decrease in disruptions. We’re seeing increased student achievement. Like, there’s so many benefits to all of this

that we know can truly turn things around for our students and make them want to come and also invest in their own learning, right? Because it’s really hard to compete when they see influencers on YouTube making millions of dollars and tell them, hey, you got to come to school today so that we can teach you how to be successful in our career. And they’re like, why? Right? Let’s make it relevant for them.

Also, I’m a big believer that if we look at the history of the world, humans were creating before they learned how to feed themselves. It is innately part of who we have been created to be. There’s no other choice. We want to express it. We want to participate in it, and it is the natural hook that’s going to bring us in.

Vicki Davis (11:18): So we’ve been talking to Susan M. Riley, founder of the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM. She’s host of Art Works for Teachers podcast and author of the new book, Creativity’s Edge. Susan, thanks for coming on today’s show.

Vicki Davis (11:33): Experience AI, co-founded by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind, sponsored today’s show. Experience AI is a free AI literacy program downloaded more than a million times worldwide. It provides teachers with ready-to-teach lessons, with slides, lesson plans, worksheets, and an excellent free AI glossary that I highly recommend downloading first.

Within the resources, there are unplugged activities for you to explore with your learners that don’t require a computer at all. Experience AI supports all teachers, regardless of subject area, and doesn’t require any computer science or background knowledge. Get Experience AI free at coolcatteacher.com/experienceai. That’s coolcatteacher.com/experienceai.

I’m recommending Experience AI because these lessons help you teach AI literacy with confidence and teach students how these systems actually work. Thank you, Experience AI, for sponsoring today’s show.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a sponsored episode and blog post. Experience AI has compensated me to share information about the Experience AI curriculum. However, all opinions expressed are my own. I have personally reviewed these resources and only recommend tools I believe offer genuine value to classroom teachers. My endorsement is limited to the educational products and services discussed in this episode. This post also includes affiliate links to books, which means that if you choose to buy I will be paid a commission at no additional cost to you. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” The sponsor has no impact on the editorial content of this show.

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Student Personal Branding Without Social Media

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Subscribe to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast and Cool Cat Teacher Talk anywhere you listen to podcasts.

We all have a reputation, whether we build it intentionally or not. One of my son’s favorite assignments from middle school was when a teacher asked him to draw a coat of arms. It included what he liked, what mattered to him, and what characteristics he wanted to portray. He was figuring out who he was. Who would even put the word “brand” with an activity like that? However, there are times we may want to take the approach of “building a personal brand.”

Whatever angle you want to take, Elisabeth Bostwick talks about authentic learning. Now, for those of us who automatically associate personal branding with social media, this doesn’t mean that students have to post on social media at all. Students can start with their strengths and interests and select brand colors as well. Elisabeth has done this with high school entrepreneurship students as well as fourth graders. For today’s Fab Idea Friday, think about activities that help students think through how they want to be viewed.

It’s not necessarily placing our kids on social media more. It’s more about helping them to identify who they are as an individual and essentially how they want to communicate that to the world…

Elisabeth Bostwick, Founder, Inspire Innovation, LLC

Listen to the Show

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Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Elisabeth Bostwick — Inspire Innovation — her site, and the place she points students when they ask where to find resources. Speaking, books, and her blog all live here. She spells it out on the show: it’s Elisabeth with an S, not a Z.
• Take the L.E.A.P.: Ignite a Culture of Innovation by Elisabeth Bostwick — her book, and the source of the framework behind this conversation: Luminous culture, Empowered learning, Authenticity in learning, Potential soars. The A is this episode. There’s also a free discussion guide (PDF) on her site if your team wants to read it together.
• Education Write Now, Volume II: Top Strategies for Improving Relationships and Culture — edited by Jeff Zoul and Sanée Bell, with Elisabeth’s chapter on cultivating student strengths and interests. Ten education authors wrote it together over a three-day retreat, and the royalties support the Will to Live Foundation.
• Spark Joy in EDU — the podcast Elisabeth co-hosts with Tisha Richmond about actively cultivating joy in your work as an educator. Note: eighteen episodes, with the most recent published in March 2025 — the back catalog is well worth your commute, but it isn’t currently releasing new shows.
• Canva for Education — free for verified K-12 teachers and their students. Elisabeth is a Canva for Education Learning Consultant, which is why Canva runs through this whole conversation.
• Canva Websites — the specific feature she describes. Her words: “I do create websites in Canva. They’re very simple. They function similarly to creating a presentation.” That’s the low-floor entry point for a student portfolio.
• Google Sites — the other no-cost portfolio home she names, and the one my own students use. Mine build a site in eighth grade and keep updating it straight through senior year.
• LinkedIn — not for high schoolers to join, but for them to read. Elisabeth puts real public profiles on the screen and has students break down why each one does or doesn’t work.
• Common Sense Media — the resource Elisabeth names on the show for students working on how they show up online.
• Common Sense Education — Digital Literacy & Well-Being Curriculum — the free K-12 classroom side of Common Sense, and where teachers should actually start. Note: this replaced the older Digital Citizenship Curriculum, which Common Sense has announced will be archived in December 2026. If you have old lesson links saved from a few years back, they’re on the clock — use the new curriculum.

I think it is important to help students understand that there are professional networks online since that is how many people find new jobs. Here’s an activity that Elisabeth suggests. You can also create Linked In templates as well.

Pull up three real, public LinkedIn profiles on your screen. Elisabeth used current college students and a few young professionals — and she deliberately included one that wasn’t polished. Then take them apart together: Why does this one work? What are its strengths? Why might this one not work? When her high schoolers said the unpolished one looked “not as professional,” that was the opening, not the end of the conversation — the profile belonged to someone showcasing graphic design, so the whole visual feel was doing a job. Nothing to buy, nothing to get approved, and not one student has to post anything.

Notice what she is not doing. She is not asking teens to build an audience. She is teaching them to read an audience. These days I’ve had my students only share privately, she has students: build it in Google Sites or Canva, keep it private, and link it out later if and when they choose to.

About Elisabeth Bostwick

Elisabeth Bostwick

Elisabeth Bostwick, founder of Inspire Innovation, LLC, is a multi-award-winning educator passionate about creating the conditions to spark curiosity and unleash creativity to empower learning.

In addition to being a Keynote Speaker and Workshop Facilitator, she is the author of Take the L.E.A.P.: Ignite a Culture of Innovation and co-author of Education Write Now Volume 2.

As an Education Innovation Consultant and Canva for Education Learning Consultant supporting K-12 educators, Elisabeth works alongside teachers to create innovative classroom cultures where every learner thrives.

With her passion for creating a long-lasting, positive impact on education, Elisabeth supports others in identifying how to cultivate systemic change and develop essential success skills to ignite a movement of inspired, confident learners.

• Website: elisabethbostwick.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/elisabeth-bostwick-a79687159
• X: @elisabostwick
• Bluesky: @elisabostwick.bsky.social
• Podcast: Spark Joy in EDU

Other Shows for Middle and High School Teachers

• How Can Students and Teachers Build a Good Personal Brand? — the Cool Cat Teacher Talk episode where Elisabeth and Dr. Will Deyamaport and I took on this same question from the teacher’s side as well as the student’s. If today’s show made you think about your own footprint and not just your students’, start here.
• Take the LEAP — Don’t Sit and Stick — Elisabeth’s first time on the 10 Minute Teacher, back in episode 633. She takes us inside her classroom and how she built a culture where authentic learning could actually happen. It’s the foundation underneath everything in today’s conversation.
• 5 Tips for Digital Portfolios — episode 766 with Tisha Poncio, and the practical companion to this one. Planning, student choice of tool, modeling, checkpoints, and sharing with a real audience — plus a free portfolio checklist rubric you can download.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

Vicki Davis (00:00): When people think of you, what do they think about? That’s part of our reputation. Some people call this a personal brand. And today we’re going to talk about helping students develop a personal brand. Now, if you don’t like the word brand, that is perfectly okay. There’s a proverb that says even a child is known by his deeds, whether what he does is good and right. We all have a reputation. What does our name mean?

What do people think when they think about us? These are good questions to ask. One of the greatest assignments one of my son’s teachers had him do was to create a coat of arms for himself in terms of what he liked and what was important to him and what characteristics were important. There are a lot of ways to do this, and one way is what some people call personal branding, and that’s what we’re learning about today.

Announcer (00:55): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:59): So today we’re talking with Elisabeth Bostwick, keynote speaker extraordinaire. She’s got a book, Take the L.E.A.P., about school culture and so many other things. But today, Liz, we’re going to talk about a really cool topic, which is authentic learning, as well as helping kids to develop their personal brand. So could you start with telling us, like, how did you get interested in this work and how is it looking with kids?

Elisabeth Bostwick (01:28): Well, with most of my work, it really does come from just my own experiences of having my own two kids. It’s my 20-year-old in particular who I was able to really see the things he was doing to create his own brand in some of the work that he’s doing, but also as he was heading off to college. I also could recognize some gaps that were needed within my own kiddos, but then just high school students in general — just understanding how they can leverage social media for their own personal brand.

Vicki Davis (01:56): That’s a really interesting topic. But, you know, there’s some people who would say, hey, Liz, those kids are on social media enough, and you’re going to do it in school?

Elisabeth Bostwick (02:05): A lot of this doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re putting our kids more on social media. So if we were to break this down into bite-sized steps, we’d really be stepping back and beginning with helping our kids understand what are their strengths, what are their passions, what are their interests, what do they want them to walk away with, what perception do they want to create that’s authentic and meaningful to them.

It’s not necessarily placing our kids on social media more. It’s more about helping them to identify who they are as an individual and essentially how they want to communicate that to the world, whether it is college admissions. It could be even if they’re going into college sports or professional sports, even just careers in the workforce.

Vicki Davis (02:45): I do an app project every semester with my ninth graders where they develop an app. And used to, I had them turn in a — quote — team report. I said, you’re going to create a TikTok-like or a Reel-like video report for me every day to kind of let me know what your team is doing.

And I had better reports, more engagement, more fun, more excitement on that project because I was letting them communicate in a way that they understood. And they were developing real-world skills. So even though over half of my kids are not on social media today, using that method helped them.

So what are some of the things you’re doing with kids?

Elisabeth Bostwick (03:22): So this does connect to my book of Take the L.E.A.P.: Ignite a Culture of Innovation, because we’re really thinking about how do we create authentic and meaningful learning experiences, just like you’re talking about. So even if we’re not in school saying, hey, use the social media platform, this can look like taking a tool such as Canva. And there are other tools, too, that you can use. One thing that I really like that I do for myself is I do create websites in Canva. They’re very simple. They function similarly to creating a presentation.

Kids can go in, they can develop, like, what do they want their brand colors? What colors represent the work that you’re doing? Are you engaging in sports, music, clubs in school? And now how do you put that together in a way that you can showcase that visually?

It’s very much similar to like a digital portfolio, but it could also incorporate academics, but really thinking about who the person is as a whole.

Vicki Davis (04:15): So tell me a story about helping a child develop their personal brand, or a student developing their personal brand, and just sort of that journey that the student went on.

Elisabeth Bostwick (04:24): We did some of this at a different level, even with fourth grade students. This is a student who didn’t necessarily shine within reading or math or your classic academic topics in school. At that time, she could come in and, without very much guidance at all, she would be able to connect the dots of how to build everything, how to make those connections. Also really took to coding, video creation.

And what was really neat about that is that other students noticed the strengths in her. So not only did this engage her and hook her in from some of the off-task behaviors that she’d do to avoid engaging in reading or writing or math because it wasn’t what she felt was her strong suit — but not only was she more engaged, but her peers recognized her strengths, and that really helped her confidence take off. So we can apply that across the board to any student. When we create the culture for that in our classrooms, we really set our students up for success.

Vicki Davis (05:20): I’ve seen students who are good at graphic design and maybe not as great in other subjects. But when they start shining in graphic design, you can just feel how much pride they have as their peers start saying, what do you think about this design? And where do I need to move this? And how can I make this look better?

And they’re constantly almost like being a consultant to their classmates, because this is a different type of skill. I mean, this is real world. I do want to talk about your entrepreneurs and your business students. Do you have a story from that work you’re doing right now?

Elisabeth Bostwick (05:52): I will say a lot of them haven’t considered how they’re showcasing who they are in social media. So that was kind of a big topic. I saw a lot of chuckles around the room when we started. I had a question up on the screen that said, think about a social media post that you may have seen somebody within your high school make that you saw and you’re thinking that probably never should have gone out there.

So, of course, these are 16, 17, 18-year-olds, and some of them are making eye contact. Like, they know that certain things shouldn’t be out there. However, I will say students — and the same can apply to adults — don’t always think about how they’re communicating about who they are on social media. And so a lot of this comes back to authentic storytelling.

How do we, staying authentic to who we are, create a story that other people can look back on and be able to connect the dots to — this is where somebody started, this is where they’re growing, this is where they’re developing, and you can kind of see the development of that person. So, again, coming back to sharing experiences, volunteer work, projects, lessons that they might have learned, especially being able to share their reflections on anything that they’ve done. I think really can show just personal values, too.

Vicki Davis (07:06): So we do a Shark Tank with our app project, and the kids create just these fantastic apps that meet all different kinds of needs. It’s a very social entrepreneurship type thing. And it really is transformational when students do real-world work. And is it one of their big questions? Why does this matter? Isn’t that part of authentic learning?

Elisabeth Bostwick (07:29): Absolutely. These are skill sets that they’re going to use beyond the classroom, from video creation to — and we even talk about like not just sharing photos on social media, but how do you bring it into a template and add elements and apply your brand color? Things don’t have to feel polished all of the time, because sometimes scrappy can also showcase a brand as well. So it just depends on what you’re communicating.

We’ve taken different LinkedIn pages. Some have been current college students. And then I did find a couple of adults that might appear like they are close to being in college age still. They’re young enough. It was really neat to break down why does this LinkedIn profile, why does this work, and what are the strengths of it, and even like why might something not work. So we tried to find various examples.

Like LinkedIn — that’s really where a lot of college kids are beginning to understand the importance of networking and building your digital portfolio there. It was neat to be able to take a couple that weren’t as polished and professional looking, because the brand might be showcasing graphic design. It’s got a completely different visual feel to it. And some of the kids were like, well, that one’s not as professional. So we got to break down, well, what are they trying to communicate? What are they telling a story about who they are and the work?

Vicki Davis (08:41): So as we finish up, Liz, talk to all the students out here who are listening to you thinking, huh, is my personal brand important? And when do I start building it?

Elisabeth Bostwick (08:51): Well, I think there is never a wrong time to get started. I think you can get started anytime. And again, you can start small. I know that some colleges will look at — colleges, workforce will look people up on social media. So it doesn’t mean that we can’t share things about our dog or family. I sure do. But at the same time, we can get started by thinking about the things that we do in school, whether it’s an activity, something you’re volunteering, a project you’re a part of, any sports that you’re involved in, music — and begin sharing pictures and just keeping simple captions.

If you’re not comfortable sharing quite yet on social media, create it in a Google site or a Canvas site or anything similar where you can put together that digital portfolio, because that can also be linked at any point to any social media channel, or you can add a social media profile link in your bio section, or you can take any of those images or videos that you create and later upload those. So you can kind of begin capturing things anywhere and then deciding how you’re most comfortable sharing.

Vicki Davis (09:52): A lot of college applications now have a hyperlink box where you can put the hyperlink, and my students will take their web pages from eighth grade, update them for being a senior and hit publish. And they’ve got it there. You know, they’ve got all the structure, the skeletal part, and then they just add a little bit to it.

Having that brand is important. But students also have to remember, it’s not like they can just have a nice little polished LinkedIn, because companies, they have whole departments for investigating potential employees and looking at all the social media of people. So being wise about your personal brand everywhere you share is just so important.

Where do you recommend students go, the resources to help them as they develop their personal brand?

Elisabeth Bostwick (10:34): There are all kinds of resources that you can find out there. I actually have a couple on my website, so you can always go there. I’ve also found things on Common Sense Media. My website is elisabethbostwick.com. It is Elisabeth with an S, not a Z.

Vicki Davis (10:48): Thank you, Liz, for the many times you’ve answered the call to come on the show. I just appreciate that you’re working with kids. I think one of the most important things I look for in educational leaders is that their passion to teach remains and that they continue to work with students, because students have changed a lot in the last few years. So thanks, Liz.

Announcer (11:06): Thank you for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This episode includes some affiliate links. This means that if you choose to buy I will be paid a commission on the affiliate program. However, this is at no additional cost to you. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

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AI and Academic Honesty: The Second Crisis in Schools

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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Honesty. We need to be honest about where we are in education. Whether authentic, true, genuine learning is happening should be the question for all of us in education. None of us wants to pretend or participate in a farce. AI guilt is now “a thing” college graduates are talking about. College graduates who are not being “caught” but feel like they spent the last years pretending to learn.

Dr. Christian Miller, author of The Honesty Crisis, has spent more than a decade running some of the largest funded research projects on honesty and moral character. He says that the internet was the first honesty crisis in education. AI is the second one.

We talk about both sides of the desk on this one. Both the student writing their paper with AI and learning nothing, and the teacher giving AI-generated feedback without disclosing it to students. This is why an honest expert is staying up at night about the papers his philosophy students are writing (or if they are not).

Whether that’s plagiarism from the internet, whether that’s plagiarism from another student’s paper, whether that’s plagiarism from AI, it still counts as plagiarism and plagiarism is dishonest.

Christian B. Miller, A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University

Listen to the Show

Watch this video on YouTube.Subscribe to the Cool Cat Teacher Channel on YouTube

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Christian’s books

• The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World (Oxford University Press) — the book at the center of this conversation. It maps six areas of society where Christian sees honesty eroding: deepfakes, infidelity, education, political misinformation, celebrity, and religion, including sermon plagiarism. Education is only one chapter. Published May 19, 2026 — we recorded this before release, so you’ll hear us both talk about it as coming. The publisher’s page is here at Oxford University Press.
• Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2021) — the academic book underneath the trade book. If you want the actual definition of honesty he keeps referring to, and why it is bigger than “don’t tell lies,” this is where it lives.
• The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (Oxford University Press, 2017) — his earlier book for general readers, and the most accessible entry point to his research on moral character. Good faculty-book-study material.
• Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (Oxford University Press, 2013) — where he first argues that most of us are neither virtuous nor vicious but a mixed bag, which is exactly the frame he uses in this episode to explain why good people still cheat when it gets easy.

The research projects

• The Honesty Project — the $4.4 million research effort Christian directed at Wake Forest University, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, built around five big questions about what honesty is, how much of it people actually have, and what makes it grow or collapse. Free, public, and a genuinely useful place to send a curious student.
• The Character Project — the earlier Wake Forest initiative he led on moral character across philosophy, psychology, and theology. Conference videos and funded research are posted there.
• The Beacon Project — the Wake Forest project on moral exemplars, the people who are not just good but exceptional, where Christian served as Philosophy Director.
• The John Templeton Foundation — the funder behind the Honesty Project and the Character Project.

The AI detector Christian names

• Pangram — the AI-detection company whose accuracy claims Christian says have caused him to revise his thinking. The specific number he cites, and what it does and does not settle, is broken down in the Sources section below. Read that before you take a detector result to a parent conference.
• Note: At this time, I’m not recommending any AI detector as I think we should focus on learning detection. Oral conversations, discussions, and methods for building on assignments should show students that we are focused on learning.

Find Christian

• christianbmiller.com — his site, with his CV, popular writing, talks, and pages for each book.
• His Honesty Project faculty page at Wake Forest University.
• @CharacterGap on X · LinkedIn · Facebook

Before you accuse anyone, ask them to walk you through the paper. When Christian gets a suspicious paper, his first move is not a detector — it is a conversation, run in the least confrontational way he can manage. Tell me about this paper. How did you write it? Walk me through the steps. Can you explain this idea? It wasn’t in the class material — where did it come from? He says students often admit it on their own at that point. And when they do, he stays lenient: there is a consequence, the grade takes a hit, but he does not fail them or send them to a hearing. They rewrite the paper and get a second chance. The whole exchange fits inside a planning period.

About Dr. Christian Miller

Dr. Christian B. Miller

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He was most recently the Director of the Honesty Project (honestyproject.philosophy.wfu.edu/), funded by a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In recent years he was the Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project (www.moralbeacons.org), funded by a $3.9 million grant from Templeton Religion Trust, and the Director of the Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com), funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 130 academic papers as well as Moral Psychology with Cambridge University Press (2021) and four books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). His new book, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, is forthcoming from Oxford in 2026.

Dr. Miller was a science contributor for Forbes, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics (Bloomsbury Press).

Editor’s note: this bio was written before publication. The Honesty Crisis is no longer forthcoming — Oxford University Press released it on May 19, 2026, and it is available now.

🐾 Sources & Citations: AI Detection Accuracy

Verified August 23, 2026. Christian says on the show that he has started revising his thinking about AI detectors, and he names a specific error rate. Here is exactly where that number comes from, who has checked it independently, and what it still does not settle. This is a fast-moving area and these are the two best sources available right now, not the last word.

Where the “one in 10,000” number comes from

Emi, B. (2025, March 27). All about false positives in AI detectors. Pangram Labs. Source

Key finding: Pangram reports an overall false-positive rate of roughly 1 in 10,000 — that is, human writing wrongly flagged as AI — and 0.004% on academic essays specifically, which works out to about 1 in 25,000. The same post lists its rates by writing type and is candid that the tool performs worst on short, formulaic text like poetry and recipes.

Caveat: This is the company’s own internally measured figure, published on the company’s own blog. Treat it as a vendor claim that happens to be unusually well documented, not as neutral testing. And a rate is not a verdict: at 1 in 10,000, a school that runs every submission through a detector will still eventually flag a student who did nothing wrong, and no detector output tells you anything about intent.

Somebody outside the company checked it

Jabarian, B., & Imas, A. (2025). Artificial writing and automated detection (NBER Working Paper No. 34223). National Bureau of Economic Research. Source

Key finding: Two University of Chicago Booth School of Business economists audited four detectors — Pangram, Originality.AI, GPTZero, and an open-source RoBERTa baseline — against a purpose-built corpus of human-written and AI-generated texts across multiple genres and lengths. Pangram had the lowest false-positive rate of the four. The paper also proposes a framework for how schools and institutions should think about writing detection into actual policy, which is the more useful half for educators.

Caveat: This is a working paper. It has not been through peer review, and it tests detectors against a constructed corpus rather than real student submissions from real classrooms. It also cannot answer the question I raise in this episode, because no detector audit can: the false negatives you never see, when a student runs AI text through a “humanizer” and keeps rerunning it until it comes back clean.

🐾 How I used AI on this post: On an episode about honesty, it would be strange not to say. I used AI to help clean up the raw interview transcript, to help draft and organize these show notes, and to help hunt down and verify the sources above. Every citation, link, book title, and publication date on this page was checked against its primary source before it went up. The opinions, the questions I asked, and the conclusions are mine. I am happy to answer any questions about AI use. Ultimately, I’m accountable for what is here.

Other Shows for Teachers Wrestling With AI and Academic Honesty

• Honest Conversations About AI: The Need for Truth — the Cool Cat Teacher Talk hour this interview came from, where Christian and MIT’s Justin Reich both join me. If this episode left you wanting the longer version, start here.
• AI Assisted Grading: A Teacher’s 30-Second Checklist — the practical companion to the uncomfortable half of this conversation. If you are using AI anywhere in your assessment workflow, run through this one next.
• Brain First, AI Second: Teaching Writing in the AI Era with Philip Seyfried of Teachers College, Columbia — on why AI detectors fail, what the MIT research actually showed, and how to build trust around AI in a writing classroom.
• How to Prevent AI Cheating: Integrity in the AI Age with Professor Laurel Aguilar-Kirchhoff — the assignment-design answer. She turned a midterm essay into a storyboard rather than fighting the tool.

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If this one gave you language for a conversation you have been avoiding at your school, share it with the teacher down the hall — and leave a review wherever you’re listening.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

Vicki Davis (00:00): If you use AI to write student feedback and they think it came from you, who’s being dishonest? Today on Thought Leader Thursday, we’re discussing the honesty crisis.

Announcer (00:12): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:16): Today we’re talking with Dr. Christian Miller, the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. For over a decade, he’s led some of the largest research projects on honesty and moral character ever funded, including The Honesty Project and The Character Project. His new book is called The Honesty Crisis, and it will be out May 19th, 2026.

We’re going to talk about something that every teacher and administrator and every college professor is feeling right now: what honesty means in the age of AI, and how it’s under threat in our classrooms from both sides of the desk. So, Christian, thanks for coming on the show.

Editor’s note: this conversation was recorded April 15, 2026. The Honesty Crisis was released by Oxford University Press on May 19, 2026, and is available now.

Christian Miller (00:58): Great to be with you. I really look forward to our conversation.

Vicki Davis (01:01): What do we do about honesty, and where has it gone, especially in the age of AI? And some people just say, oh, it’s always been this bad. As a teacher who’s been teaching 24 years, I’m not convinced. What do you think?

Christian Miller (01:12): On the historical question, I’m not convinced either. I mean, student cheating has been around forever. That’s nothing new. That’s nothing we haven’t heard before. I did think, though, that it ramped up when we shipped it to the Internet. So when the Internet came along, that was first what I call an honesty crisis, where honesty becomes more appealing and dishonesty is hard to detect. So it’s easier to get away with dishonesty. When you had the Internet, that was, I think, the first big moment.

Editor’s note: “where honesty becomes more appealing” is left exactly as spoken because both independent transcriptions of this audio produce the same words. From context, Dr. Miller appears to mean DIShonesty becoming more appealing. Unresolved — flagged for review before this line is quoted.

You could go online, you could find material, you could put that material into your paper or find answers to problem sets and really cut corners that way. But that didn’t end there, of course. And so with the dawn of AI, I think that’s now the second honesty crisis we’re facing in education. Progression of more and more opportunity to cheat, as well as difficulty in being caught cheating.

That’s a bad combination. When it’s easier to cheat and it’s more difficult to get caught cheating, recipe for dishonesty.

Vicki Davis (02:04): So what does your research say about honesty and this topic? I mean, do people want to be honest? Is it as rampant as we think it is, according to the research?

Christian Miller (02:13): In general, I think people do want to be honest, but there are limits. It only goes so far. So the research I’ve consulted suggests that, in general, we believe that things like cheating are wrong. We also care about how we’re perceived by others. We want to be perceived by others as honest people. We even want to think of ourselves as honest people. So those are all good things. Those are going to keep dishonesty in check.

At the same time, we do have a desire to cheat if we think we can get away with it, and it’ll benefit ourselves. Our character, I think, here is complicated. It’s multifaceted. It’s not like simplistic. We’re good, we’re bad. We’re honest, we’re dishonest. I think we’re a mixed bag. As the opportunity to cheat gets easier and the rewards get greater, the good side of our character can erode. So that belief that cheating is wrong will have limits. That desire to think of ourselves as good people or not as people, that has limits.

So what is happening with the AI situation is, before there was always this threat, maybe I’ll get caught. There was this idea, well, it’s still going to take me some work to go on the Internet, and I’m going to have to find this stuff, and I’m going to have to change it and adapt it for my purposes. Now it’s so easy that a lot of the traditional safeguards aren’t as effective as they once were. So all I have to do is go to this website, give the prompt, and I can get, in a span of five seconds or 10 seconds, my assignment completed for me. I can get a quality work done for me in 10 seconds, whereas normally that would take me an hour or two. That’s a really hard temptation to resist. Once you know it’s there, it’s available to you, it’s a really hard temptation to resist.

Vicki Davis (03:57): So you’ve also said something that’s caught my attention — that in education, the dishonesty problem isn’t only about students, but it’s also about teachers using AI to give feedback. Now, I will admit that I use AI to support me. So I’ll put in my rubric and I’ll grade, and I’ll go in AI and I’ll say, hey, this is the points they have off, you know, write this up so that I can paste it in. And I’m kind of, I guess, using it like a word calculator.

But what’s your perspective on AI to give feedback? Is it having AI, quote, grade — something I personally think we should never have teachers do? Or what’s your take on that side of the desk?

Christian Miller (04:36): Yeah, I think it’s so easy to jump into the student side of it and just focus on that. But I think there’s lots of other aspects to this whole AI discussion. I mean, we could even have a discussion of whether AI itself is honest or not.

There’s a question of what about in the teacher’s research, if they’re doing research or just newsletter, publication, communication with parents, all that kind of side of thing if they’re using AI.

But here you’re focusing specifically on teachers grading or teachers assessing student work. I think it’s all a question of whether there’s transparency or not. So let’s start with the student case, but then go where you took us, to the teacher case. I have no problem from an honesty perspective if a student is transparent that they used AI, because now we’re out of the — there may be other problems. Maybe they weren’t supposed to, maybe they’re violating the rules, but from an honesty perspective, at least they’re forthcoming, they’re transparent about what they did.

If they don’t do that, if they present their work as if it were their own with no disclosure when it wasn’t, then that actually meets the definition of plagiarism. So they’re using another source to produce the work and they’re taking credit for that work themselves. That’s just a kind of standard example of plagiarism. Whether that’s plagiarism from the internet, whether that’s plagiarism from another student’s paper, whether that’s plagiarism from AI, it still counts as plagiarism and plagiarism is dishonest.

Now we shift to the teacher case. If the teacher says, look, I’m going to assess your work using the help of these tools. Some of my communication with you is going to be generated by AI to help save some time of writing these emails or whatnot — might be other ethical questions that arise, but there’s no, in my mind, question about honesty.

Here’s where I think it gets quite tricky. So the student gets the paper back. On the paper are some typed comments, or somewhere there’s this feedback. The feedback is AI generated. The student isn’t told that. It looks like it’s coming from the teacher. That’s what any reasonable person would have assumed is not.

They’re actually being dishonest towards the student. If that were to be discovered, that would be a violation of trust, and I think erode the trust in the classroom, which is very important to have.

Vicki Davis (06:50): Our policy at our school is that some AI feedback tools are allowed, but with complete oversight with a teacher, complete transparency to your students. So if I have a massive project and I have AI, quote, looking at it or whatever and supporting me as it’s a huge project, I always say, okay, students, I’ve reviewed this. This is the grade that I’ve given you. But I did use AI in portions of assessing this for you. So if you have any questions or issues, I want you to look this over and bring it back to me. Is that how we should handle it? Or should we just not even use it at all?

Christian Miller (07:28): Well, as far as an honesty perspective, I have no objections at all. You’re being very transparent. You’re being very clear.

There’s a larger question of role modeling beyond honesty. You know, how should we think about a good person? How should we become better? And one really important idea is role modeling good character in front of other people, if you want to try and inspire them to be good themselves.

So the point here is, transparency is great, no problem with honesty. Now, if you’re saying that to the students, they’re going to naturally have the thoughts, well, if you’re using that, why can’t I?

Vicki Davis (08:04): And of course, in my classroom, they can, but yeah.

Christian Miller (08:07): Yeah, but many of them wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be allowed. So if it’s perceived as in any way a double standard or hypocritical, like you’re not letting us use it, but you’re using it, why not let us use it too? That’s going to create problems.

So instead, if the idea is I’m going to role model — look, I know these tools are available, I’m not going to use them. I’m going to instead pour myself into grading this paper using my own knowledge and experience and skills, and it might be not as reliable. So I want you to come to me if I made a mistake or whatnot, but at least you know that this is entirely me speaking and I’m not drawing on anything else. That’s another idea. I’m not saying it’s better or worse. I’m reticent to tell someone who’s working tremendous hours in K through 12 that they’re doing something wrong.

Vicki Davis (08:53): So when we have a student bring something to us, I mean, all of us teachers have a different way of, quote, handling the situation.

Say my friend Dawn across the hall — a student brings her paper that is obviously most likely AI written. And we know AI detectors don’t work, which is a big part of the problem. Is there any research on the best way to handle that possible dishonesty issue?

Christian Miller (09:18): I have a couple of things to say here that are going to be controversial, and I’ll just flag that. And, you know, listeners, please feel free to take it for what it’s worth.

On the detector front, I would have agreed with you maybe even a year ago or two years ago. And I know you’ve had past guests talk about this too. Recently there seems to be a bit of a change, a pivot. So I’m seeing places like Pangram, which are reporting stunning reliability and detection. So almost no false positives. So one in 10,000 kind of rates of error with false positives. So I am revising my thinking a bit about whether to go to these detectors or not.

Even if that’s true — let’s just assume that there is this great detector out there now — still, I think we want to have some valid concerns about using it. One is it’s not 100% reliable. Even if it’s 99.99% reliable, it’s not 100%. So there’s questions of whether it’s going to meet the threshold for punishment of the students, especially in my case at a university. We have an actual committee where you would have to go through kind of trial process. And so would we meet the evidentiary bar there? I mean, and there’s also larger questions about trust and, you know, if this is something that’s known to students, they’re going to have to run their papers through that. What kind of classroom environment does it create? Does it break down trust in the classroom and create an atmosphere of fear? Those are all valid points and concerns.

So, having said that, I’m of two minds. One part of my mind says, okay, this person has brought this paper to me, has brought a paper to me that they’re suspicious about. One part of my mind says, let’s use these detectors and see what they tell us. Part of my mind says, let’s enter a conversation with a student. So if it’s my student, I would have a student come in. If the professor came to me, I recommend to the professor enter in a conversation with that student, to try and do it in as least confrontational a way as possible, to try and extract that truth from the students about what they did, rather than making it adversarial from the very beginning.

I’ll say, look, you know, a student comes into my office — bit about this paper. How did you write it? Walk me through the steps. Can you explain this idea? This wasn’t something in the class material. Where did this come from? How did you learn about this? At some point, often they will say, I admit I used some other source.

Editor’s note: both transcriptions garble a few words at the start of this exchange (one renders it “read about this paper,” the other “bit about this paper”). The likely phrasing is “tell me a bit about this paper,” but the audio is not clear enough to state that, so the fragment is left as transcribed.

If they do that, then I tend to be quite lenient. I will not take them to any kind of hearing. I’m not going to get other people involved. I’ll say something along the lines of, look, there has to be some kind of consequence for this, but I’m not going to fail you for the class. I’m not going to sack you for the entire grade. Your grade will take a hit, but let’s learn from this, rewrite the paper, and give you a second chance.

Vicki Davis (12:00): They were honest. So in the detection, you know, my students are pretty open and honest. We’ve had conversations about humanizers, right? Students will, whatever AI tool of their choices, generate or use it. And then they’ll pull it into a, quote, humanizer, which supposedly makes it undetectable. And then they’ll run it through whatever AI detection tool they know people they’re using, until they get a paper.

So while a detection service may have false positives, I guess my question is always what you can’t test, which is the false negatives, right? Like, that’s the big unknown here, because all it takes is one or two getting away with it, telling all their peers they’re getting away with it, to discredit any AI detection tool we could try to use.

We want to make this easy. It just doesn’t feel like an easy solution. And it is a crisis. I agree.

Christian Miller (12:53): If you want the magic solution, I’m not going to have it. Also say, confess, I struggle the most about this. And I don’t have an answer. And this is what keeps me up at night, is when we get to more advanced classes. And this would apply, I think, in middle school and high school, not just in college. Intro classes are one thing. More advanced classes are another.

In my case, I’m a philosopher, teach majors-level philosophy classes. How can I not have papers, which I want my students to reflect on the topic, do a lot of thinking, construct an argument, raise objections, respond to the objections, do all that kind of work, which you can’t really cram into 50 minutes of class? How can I take that away from them and still think that I’m doing a good job teaching them and giving them the skills that they need as philosophy majors or proficient students in English or history? I don’t have an answer to that, and that keeps me up at night.

Vicki Davis (13:46): We have to be honest with ourselves about the state that AI has put us in with education. Because if we can’t discuss these honestly and say, hey, I’m not buying the line of the tech companies that AI is going to fix everything — AI has broken a lot of things.

And a lot of us K-12 have moved to oral conversations. My AP class, they have to be able to defend every line of code verbally, on the spot. But then part of my struggle with the handwritten papers — we’re doing that too — is that when you have a student who is dysgraphic and dyslexic, as I do in my own family, and struggles with written expression, those students literally and legally need technology to be able to help them to truly express themselves in the world.

And then there’s the piece of entry-level jobs are going away in lieu of jobs where people can manage AI. They have to be able to manage AI agents is where we’re heading, and know how to do that type of work. So we really are in a conundrum, aren’t we?

Christian Miller (14:59): We are. So I have a similar situation in my family, so I’m very cognizant of that.

You could make the quick point, but it’s not completely satisfactory, that there’s one thing of, and it’s a different thing of using a computer with internet access. We have ways of shutting off or blocking internet access, so at least they have the typing tools and the spell check and whatnot without the option of going somewhere else for help. But that’s not a completely satisfactory point.

I agree with you also on — well, at my level of college here, doing a disservice if we’re not providing an opportunity to the students to make use of these tools, because then they’ll be at a disadvantage when they get out in the job world. I don’t know about that. I mean, I think they have plenty of opportunity to use this on their own, and they’re using it all the time anyway.

And at least in my world of the humanities, I don’t see — I mean, maybe it really varies by field. So maybe I should qualify what I say. My business students would be different or my science students would be different. Maybe I have to go field by field. I’m not so sure that my humanities students are at a disadvantage if I say, look, I don’t want you to use this stuff for my philosophy papers. I think they’re going to have plenty of opportunity to use it for other things. Maybe I’m here being naively optimistic, but I don’t want to think that I’m disadvantaging them by discouraging them from using it.

Vicki Davis (16:18): So, Christian, what is your goal for the book, The Honesty Crisis?

Christian Miller (16:22): The book is larger in scope than just education. So it’s talking about six different areas of society where I see honesty crisis happening, and education is only one of them. Others include things like deepfake videos, political misinformation, celebrity, even religion. I talk about things like sermon plagiarism. So I’m worried about honesty crisis popping up all over the place.

I guess my goals would be threefold. One, just appreciate what honesty is in the first place. Get a better handle on what it is to be an honest person. That’s actually quite interesting and more nuanced and complex than you might have thought. It’s not just a matter of don’t tell lies. It has way more richness to it than that.

So greater appreciation of what honesty is. Greater appreciation of where it’s eroding in society, places we might not even have paid attention to. AI in the education case is an obvious one. Some are more subtle.

Lastly, a kind of feeling and a motivation to do something about it. Not only now I’m better equipped and more knowledgeable about this, but I’m also inspired to change my life and work towards change in other people’s lives to address these honesty crises. There are things we can do concretely. It’s really important that we do them, because honesty is our most treasured virtue. It erodes. Terrible things tend to happen in society. So it’s worth fighting for.

Vicki Davis (17:41): Honesty is worth fighting for. As an educator, I want to believe in the integrity of what’s happening in my classroom. I mean, we don’t want to give our lives for something that’s pretend, that’s fake, that’s not real. And we know that people struggle with, you know, what do I believe in in the world anymore?

You know, more than ever, kids do need to see teachers who do have honesty and integrity and understanding — all of us are flawed, of course. But as I say to my kids, when you mess up, fess up.

So we’ve been talking with Dr. Christian Miller. The book is The Honesty Crisis. It’s one I’m looking forward to, and I think that we all should be discussing. As I always say, we don’t play king of the hill, we make a bigger hill. There’s a lot of room for conversation, and these are the things that we need to be talking about in our staff meetings, at the lunch table, as we move forward and work to make the world a better place. So thank you, Dr. Miller, for being part of that conversation.

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The post AI and Academic Honesty: The Second Crisis in Schools appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

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