From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis
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Tim Plaehn is a teacher who writes about honor codes. In his writing class last April, he believed he had two students he knew used AI. So, he gave the whole class an opportunity to “come clean,” and he said his email began dinging while 22 of the 40 students admitted they had used AI on their papers. Tim has authored the book, The Honor Code: Students, Integrity, and our Path Forward , where he talks about integrity and how we need to be discussing integrity with our students. This is not an easy topic but an important one!
Listen to my conversation with Tim Plaehn — or watch it on YouTube, or read the full transcript.
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.
Tim spent ten years as faculty chair of the honor council at Asheville School. No, their school didn’t publicly shame students, but the situations were hard nonetheless. He was the one who sat across the table from the students. He also knows the consequences if students aren’t held accountable (and sometimes even when they are.)
He also talks about some restorative practices. For example, a letter the student writes to their parents about the situation (that never gets sent.) We have so many issues with students these days and Tim shares some practical ideas and thoughts that can help shape our conversations about honor and integrity in school today.
I want to give you a chance to restore your integrity because you’re headed off to college and it’s going to be all you.
Tim Plaehn, American Studies teacher at Asheville School
Listen to the Show
Watch this video on YouTube.Subscribe to the Cool Cat Teacher Channel on YouTube
Middle and high school teachers who have caught it and don’t know what to do next — and the deans, principals, and department chairs who write the policy they’re working under. If you have ever wondered whether your school’s response to cheating actually changes anybody, this is your twelve minutes.
Key Takeaways for Teachers from Tim Plaehn
- Separate conduct from honor. (06:31) Out of the dorm after lights gets a detention; cheating on a test gets a conversation with the honor council chairs about what you did and what you’re going to do about it. Two different problems were getting one response, and Tim says pulling them apart is what made the whole thing work.
- Offer restoration before you run detection. (10:57) Tim didn’t put the papers through software — he emailed forty-five students and gave them a way to come back, and twenty-two of them took it that night. A detector would have found the two he already knew about, but he would have missed that over half the class used AI. (As I’ve said before, because DETECTORS DON’T WORK!)
- Have them write the letter, then don’t send it. (07:11) Students write to their parents about what they did — and Tim tells them up front it isn’t going anywhere. It’s not the punishment; it’s the part where they have to say it in their own words.
- Answer “I know my child’s heart” honestly. (02:58) No parent knows their child’s heart well enough to rule out a mistake, and Tim’s response is the one I keep coming back to: when a kid asks “Dad, don’t you trust me?”, the answer has to be no — not because they’re bad, but because they’re fifteen.
The next time a student owns up to cheating, don’t start with the consequence. Hand them paper and have them write a letter to their parents explaining what they did and why — and tell them before they start that you are not going to send it. Tim’s whole point is that the letter isn’t evidence and it isn’t a punishment. It’s the only step in the process where the student has to put the thing into their own words, to the people whose opinion of them they actually care about. It takes one class period and costs nothing.
The part of this conversation that will divide a faculty room is the fourth line of Tim’s honor code — the one where students agree to report violations. He is candid that it is the piece most often broken, and he doesn’t pretend there is a clean answer. What he offers instead is a way of framing it that doesn’t turn a school into an informant culture: snitching, he says, is what you call it when a community is protecting the person who did wrong instead of the community itself.
I mention the Common Sense Media research in this episode. Here is the current number: 86% of kids ages 9 to 17 use AI, and nearly a quarter use it every day — 81% of 9-to-12-year-olds, 89% of 13-to-15-year-olds, and 92% of 16-and-17-year-olds. More than four in ten say no parent or guardian has ever talked with them about AI safety, and while three-quarters say their school has covered what they can and cannot use AI for, only just over half have been taught how to use it safely. Source: The Common Sense Media Census: AI Use by Tweens and Teens (2026), released June 8, 2026, surveying 1,204 children.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
- The Honor Code: Students, Integrity, and Our Path Forward — Tim’s book, built on four real honor cases he fictionalized to protect the students in them. He explains why at 01:33: at his school, an honor case is nobody else’s business.
- Tim Plaehn’s Substack — where he writes about integrity in schools and in the wider culture, and publishes excerpts from the book.
- The Honor Code podcast — Tim’s own show, on the same subject as the book.
- Asheville School — the North Carolina boarding school where Tim teaches American Studies and chaired the honor council for ten years. The campus detail he describes at 08:01 — laptops and backpacks left out in the open because nobody expects them to be taken — is the culture the honor code is protecting.
- The West Point Cadet Honor Code — the non-toleration model Tim admires at 10:02.
- The Common Sense Media Census: AI Use by Tweens and Teens (2026) — the research behind the number I cite at 14:12. Released June 8, 2026; 1,204 children ages 9–17.
Editor’s note on the West Point honor code: Tim paraphrases it in conversation. The code itself reads, “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Asheville School’s own code — the one whose fourth line Tim is describing — reads, “I will not lie, cheat, or steal, and I will report any violations of the honor code.”
About Tim Plaehn
Tim Plaehn is a writer and teacher living in Asheville, North Carolina. Over his thirty-year career in education he has taught in Las Vegas, Hartford, Atlanta, and Asheville and has earned advanced degrees from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the Bread Loaf School of English. He has been awarded Clark County’s New Teacher of the Year Award, the Charles N. Carter Leadership Award in Coaching, and the William F. Lewis Faculty Chair for Teaching and Coaching Excellence, among others.
His first screenplay, The Panjiayuan Diary, won the Beijing International Screenwriting Competition, and he followed that up with The Reconstruction of Huck Finn (Over Mark Twain’s Dead Body!), a Nicholl Fellowship semi-finalist in 2017. His play West Asheville was selected to The Barefoot Theatre’s reading series at the Art of Acting Studio in Los Angeles and for a workshop performance at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. His short play Jenna Feldman, A One-Woman Show won the audience favorite award at The Hickory Playground’s One-Act Play Festival, and Metallica Is the Last Straw was selected for a performance at Toronto’s InspiraTO Festival. He’s been published in Short Story America and Creative Loafing and has written screenplays on sumo wrestling, golfing across America, and a family reunion in Ireland gone terribly wrong. That last screenplay had a Top 3 finish in The Nantucket Film Festival’s screenplay competition in 2022, prompting Olivia Wingate to sign on as producer. He was also awarded Ireland’s Aran Islands Poetry Fellowship, and he spent a month cold, wet, and happy on Inis Mor.
His book is The Honor Code: Students, Integrity, and Our Path Forward.
Find Tim: timplaehn.substack.com · The Honor Code podcast
Other Shows for Teachers and Administrators Facing the Honesty Question
- AI and Academic Honesty: The Second Crisis in Schools — philosopher Dr. Christian Miller, author of The Honesty Crisis, on why the internet was the first honesty crisis and AI is the second — and why it runs on both sides of the desk. If this episode landed, that one is the companion.
- Honest Conversations About AI: The Need for Truth — the Cool Cat Teacher Talk episode with MIT’s Justin Reich and Dr. Christian Miller on research, integrity, and what we are actually measuring.
- The Human Side of AI: A Student’s ChatGPT Experience — a student who ran his teachers’ assignments through ChatGPT for his senior project to see which ones held up. The other side of Tim’s story.
Listen and Subscribe
If your school is still arguing about detection software, send this one to whoever writes the policy.
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 Wonderful Classroom Wednesday. This is episode 982, and we’re talking about honesty. We’re talking to a teacher who works with the honor code. He thought that only two papers out of 45 had been written by AI, but when he emailed the whole class, over half. Let’s learn.
Announcer (00:21): This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis (00:25): 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. What if the reason cheating keeps winning in so many schools isn’t that kids have gotten worse? It’s that we’ve been treating honesty like a rule instead of teaching it like a subject. Our guest today has spent 10 years as the head of the honor council at a school in North Carolina, watching real students face real consequences. Tim Plaehn teaches American Studies at Asheville School, holds a master’s from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and was awarded Aran Islands Poetry Fellowship. And he has just published The Honor Code: Students, Integrity, and Our Path Forward. Tim, your book is built on four real cases. Pick one of them. The moment a student sat across from you and you realized this wasn’t going to be simple.
Tim Plaehn (01:33): Well, first of all, I fictionalized the stories. One of our big principles at our school is that, this is no one else’s business. It’s really just the chairs of the honor council talking with the student and kind of keeping it in-house. So what I did, I took real cases, I changed the names and I changed the details and I kept the kernels of truth. One of my favorite students who made a terrible decision one day, he walked into another student’s dorm room, took $100 and went back to his room, immediately regretted it and came to me with $100 and said, what do I do now? So to kind of hold his hand through that process of stealing is an immediate expulsion at our school. And yet this kid, by coming forward and talking it through and expressing his regret, we ended up giving him a second chance. We felt like he was teaching, himself his own lesson before we even got to him. And then the story ends during his senior year when he steals from a store and he ends up getting expelled right before graduation.
Vicki Davis (02:43): Oh, my.
Tim Plaehn (02:44): And it’s just a reminder that kids make bad decisions. And we have to be there, not just to bear witness, but to help them process these decisions that they’re making so that they don’t make them as they become adults.
Vicki Davis (02:58): Well, Tim, one of the challenges, and, you know, I’ve been teaching 24 years, is that I believe early on in my career, not always, But for the most part, students and parents would own up to issues. But I’ve seen several cases, you know, in the past 10 years where we had it on film. We knew the student did it. And we’ve even seen this in some very public cases where you see that the person did it. And the parents say, I’m not even looking at the tape, no matter what they said. If they say they didn’t do it, they didn’t do it. That’s not reality. Kids do make mistakes. How do we deal with this dysreality of those who claim their child would never lie? I had a parent one time say, I know my child’s heart. My child would never lie. And I’m like. You don’t know your child’s heart because all humans can make mistakes and can lie.
Tim Plaehn (03:50): It’s so funny. You know, you think of like Hollywood movies or TV shows where the kid says to the parent, Dad, don’t you trust me? The answer has to be no. Like as parents, we have to know that these are teenagers and these are flawed human beings and they’re going to make mistakes and they’re going to try to wriggle out of tough situations. You said you are a parent of three. Yes. And as my kids were growing, I said to myself, I’m always taking the teacher’s side. I’m always taking the school’s side. Did you have a similar commitment?
Vicki Davis (04:21): Well, you know, our commitment was because we had two with learning differences. And so we had advocacy that had to happen. So in front of my child, I was always going to be taking that teacher’s side. I didn’t want my child to feel like, oh, I need to give my parent more ammo. However, there were times where they might take me something and I might privately go to the teacher. Or I would teach my child to advocate for themselves. One of mine could not copy off the board without making mistakes. And his math teacher kept writing tests on the board. And so he would copy down 20% of the problems wrong, as we knew he would. And he would work the wrong problem, but he would work it in the right way. But understanding that authority exists, right and wrong exists, that makes the fabric of a home and a society hold together. When you start conditionalizing truth, we have problems. Yeah.
Tim Plaehn (05:19): You’re in trouble. And that’s one of the reasons I wrote this book is to kind of start a conversation about this and how we all approach this. And I think even when I was frustrated with one of my children’s teachers, it’s all about conversations. It’s all about dialogue. And it’s not coming at the problem necessarily as opposition. And that’s what I found. There have been some cases over the years where. Parents have come after me because I was trying to get their child to tell the whole truth.
Vicki Davis (05:53): Yeah.
Tim Plaehn (05:55): And they wanted to protect their child. But of course, in so doing, they’re not protecting their child in a way that’s going to help them grow and become a responsible, critical thinking adult. I think that challenge is becoming increasingly more pronounced for us as teachers.
Vicki Davis (06:11): Because to have redemption, my goal of any behavioral issue is that we’ll learn from it, we’ll grow from it, we’ll redeem the mistake. But if you can’t admit there’s a mistake, if you can’t admit that you did wrong, you can’t even start that process because then you’re dealing with lying.
Tim Plaehn (06:30): Right. And this is, at Asheville School, what we do is we separate conduct from honor. We found that when they’re together, things get messy, things get overly complicated. Let’s say a student is in another dorm room after lights. That’s a conduct issue. You’ll have detention. But if you cheat on a test, that’s an honor issue. And you’re going to sit down with the chair of the honor council, both the student chair and the faculty chair, and just kind of talk through your thought process, why you did this, what you could have done differently. And then to your point, what is the restorative justice step we’re going to take? You know, is it a quick note to the teacher? Is it, sometimes I would have my offenders write a letter to their parents that we would not send. And I’d tell them, we’re not going to send this to your parents, but what would it feel like for you to have to tell your parents that you did this? How would that impact you? What would you say to them? Just so they can kind of process their misstep emotionally and kind of think through those consequences down the road.
Vicki Davis (07:37): So when you talk about honor, the pledge that you were sworn to uphold ends with, I will report any violations. So you’re asking 15-year-olds to turn in a friend. How can you enforce this without it becoming like a snitch society? I like how you separate conduct from honor, but how do you manage this and encourage to turn in violations and not have that snitch environment?
Tim Plaehn (08:01): It’s a super difficult job. Like the fourth point of our honor code is the one that gives our students the most pause. And without us being able to chase it down, it’s certainly the piece of our honor code that’s most often broken. Students know what other students are up to. Well, I try to frame it, though, is this idea of snitching or tattling that comes from a culture of, that wants to protect those making mistakes against an institution or against a community. And if you want to live in a certain kind of community, you have to face up to certain responsibilities. On our campus, for instance, we don’t put anything away. You’ll see computers and phones and backpacks just strewn about outside rooms, you know, because the expectation in our community is that nothing will be stolen and that we trust each other. Well, part of the creation of that community is that we’ve got some skin in the game, that we all want to see this community in such a light. And so you have to then take responsibility. What I tell my students, because it’s a tough one, it really is. You know, would you tell on your neighbor if he were violating the water ban in your community and, you know, spraying his lawn at night? And they’re like, oh, no, we’d probably let that go. I’m like, okay, what if he was running an international children’s sex ring? Like, what? I’m like, yeah, you’re going to step up. You’re going to do something. That’s a hard step for a teenager to make and figure out when to do that. But to their credit, we have some students who are like, you know, I’m not comfortable telling you this, but I saw Steve cheating on this test. Ultimately, it’s for Steve’s benefit that that student is coming forward to tell us. Ultimately, Steve is going to learn that cheating is only going to get him so far. But I agree with you. It’s a challenge. I like how West Point does it in their honor code. It says, I will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor will I tolerate any violation of the honor code. And that idea that a West Point grad is going to hold his fellow or her fellow cadets up to a certain standard because they’re trying to make our military, you know, operate at a certain level. So you’re not going to tolerate someone who’s taking shortcuts because what’s going to happen down the road when you really need that person to step up?
Vicki Davis (10:36): Honor is important for a reason. None of us want to waste our time. Teachers are optimists. We want the future to be better than the past. And we want to pour into these kids. And when we feel like, what just happened? Did I just pretended to give you an assignment? You just pretended to do it? Then some teachers AI grade it. So then I just pretended to grade it.
Tim Plaehn (10:55): What are we doing?
Vicki Davis (10:56): We’re better than this, right?
Tim Plaehn (10:57): There was an assignment I gave and this was an eight week research paper. They got to choose their topics and dive in. And, you know, we had weeks and weeks of research, note-taking, outlining, drafting. And finally the due date came and it was a Sunday night and I was grading these papers and I came across two that were clearly AI. By the end of the year, I know they’re writing very well. As a teacher, the betrayal you feel. I can’t believe they would do this to me. But I said, you know what? I want to give them a chance. To restore their integrity. So I emailed all 44 of my students and I said, hey, a number of you use ChatGPT on these papers. I want to give you a chance to restore your integrity because you’re headed off to college and it’s going to be all you. So all I want you to do is if you use ChatGPT, just email me back and say, my bad. Then you and I will tackle what comes next. We’ll get through this together. The number of dings that began coming through on my computer as I went away, I had found two out of 45 and it was just ding, ding, ding. By the end of the night, 22 of my students had come forward and said, I did use ChatGPT. It was an eight page paper. It was challenging. They started to run out of things to say on page six and they took that unfortunate step. I love the fact that they came forward. I love the fact that they admitted it. And we got to have a really good talk about what are they going to do in college? Like, How are you going to face this in college with assignment after assignment after assignment?
Vicki Davis (12:25): How did you feel as 22 dings after you sent that email and you’re like, what? Like that shakes you.
Tim Plaehn (12:34): It really did. It really did. It shook them. Which I appreciated. You know, when we unpacked it over the next few days, like they were a little like, golly, all of us? You know, they might have known a few here and there, but not even my students were expecting 22 out of 45. And apparently I was told by another student that one of his friends was too scared to come forward. He was going to ride it out. So apparently it was 23 out of 45. That was a tough, tough April for me.
Vicki Davis (13:08): I appreciate you speaking the truth because I’ll tell you, as I’ve dealt with it in certain things, I’ve had the talk and had one or two and found out it was over half the class. This is not just a Tim or a Vicki thing. This is a everything, everywhere.
Tim Plaehn (13:25): Where it seems so many of my friends at a number of schools, so many of them are focused on AI and AI instructions and AI discussions without the attendant discussions of integrity. What exactly is it we’re after? Companies pushing schools to really invest in AI instruction because this is the future and kids need to know AI. I have no doubt that they’re right, but I think what our kids really need to learn at this stage is how to think critically, how to be honest, how to be persevering. You know, I think those are the skills that are going to provide for them for the rest of their lives.
Vicki Davis (14:12): The current research from Common Sense Media says 84% of kids are now using AI.
Tim Plaehn (14:16): I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for our teenagers is authenticity. Like, Who you are is not your latest Instagram post or who you are is not the influencer you’re following. And so I think ideas like that, ideas like integrity, authenticity, being honest, those are some skills that we’ve really got to dig into. But I think as institutions, we have to figure out a way to bring this idea into every single classroom and kind of speak with one voice about its importance.
Vicki Davis (14:56): So we’ve been talking with Tim Plaehn, American Studies teacher at Asheville School, and he has just published The Honor Code: Students, Integrity, and Our Path Forward. Tim, thanks for coming on the show and thanks for telling your story. 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 forward slash experience AI. That’s coolcatteacher.com forward slash experience AI. 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.
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