Teaching Integrity Like Experts Practice It

Most academic integrity policies are built to catch students doing something wrong. But when three writing researchers watched expert scholars work in real time, they found that those scholars practice integrity as something entirely different: a way of caring for the people they cite.

That gap was the focus of our latest faculty workshop. I met Paul Michiels during a user interview, and by the end of the call I wanted to go back to school. He told me about the book he had co-written with Karyn Kessler and Paul M. Rogers, Crafting Ethical Scholarship, published by University of California Press. I bought it, started reading, and kept thinking: this is the conversation faculty need right now.

So we invited all three authors to share their research with other Consensus users. Professors, librarians, and writers joined from Switzerland, Hong Kong, Bogotá, South Africa, Puerto Rico, and across North America. They teach neuroscience, business, AP Research, psychology, and more.

This article shares what we learned and how you can bring it into your classroom.

Watch the full webinar.

The Three Gaps Shaping Today’s Classroom

Paul Rogers, an associate professor of writing studies and director of the writing program at UC Santa Barbara who studies how writing develops over time, opened by naming the pressures every classroom is under:

• A skills gap. Pandemic-era schooling left many students behind in reading, writing, and analysis, through no fault of their own.

• An attention gap. Deep, slow research work is competing with algorithms built to capture focus (ours too).

• A trust gap. Rogers pointed to recent MIT guidance warning that overreliance on generative AI can weaken mastery, reduce meaningful interaction, and challenge the foundations of academic learning.

The answer, he argued, isn’t fighting the current alone: “Our greatest resource is leaning on the shared wisdom of our professional communities to figure this out together.”

What 15 Years of Research Says About How Experts Actually Write

The team has studied source-based writing empirically for over fifteen years, through corpus analysis, think-aloud protocols, and interviews with award-winning scholars and academic integrity specialists. A few findings stood out.

Our paraphrase instruction contradicts itself. After analyzing 134 college writing handbooks, they found advice like “work sentence by sentence” in one guide and “don’t paraphrase one sentence at a time” in another. One says substitute synonyms for keywords; another says keep the keywords. As Rogers put it, that’s “a clear indicator that our pedagogical prescriptions are not grounded in an evidence base.”

What counts as acceptable "borrowing" depends on the field. There’s no one-size-fits-all rule for source use, so there can’t be a one-size-fits-all policy.

Experts think far more than they write. In think-alouds, scholars spent most of their time pausing, rereading, and planning, with only bursts of actual text. That matters now more than ever: “If we treat writing as text generation, AI can do that in seconds,” Rogers said. “If we recognize that true source-based writing is a deep cognitive exercise, we have to stop grading just final products.”

Experts lean on a stack of tools. Karyn Kessler, an associate teaching professor of linguistics at UC Santa Barbara who studies how students learn to integrate sources and join their disciplines, described screen-shared sessions where scholars moved between Consensus, Overleaf, Zotero, and several Google Docs at once. Many kept “scaffolding notes,” sometimes over 100 pages, collecting feedback from as many as 11 colleagues, reviewers, and editors.

The Academic Integrity Gap

This is the heart of the book, and Karyn walked us through it.

Integrity specialists described their work as oriented almost entirely around student misconduct: preventing, detecting, judging, and punishing it. One told the team that people on campus call their unit “the office of academic dishonesty” without noticing the irony (it’s now the title of Chapter 8 of Crafting Ethical Scholarship). Another summed up the classroom reality: academic integrity “ends up being a statement on their course syllabus.”

Expert scholars live in a different world. For them, integrity is relational. Every citation decision connects back to a disciplinary community of colleagues, mentors, and former students.

“I’m building on this community when I cite them… I love citing their work because I feel like I’m always in conversation with them.”
- An anthropologist in the team’s think-aloud data

An archaeologist called choosing one citation “a political decision,” picking a scholar who pushes the field to treat data more justly. A single reference became a lever for moving a discipline’s ethics.

Karyn’s goal for students is a shift in kind, not degree: “We want students to understand academic integrity as something you do and uphold and shape and enact, not as a static set of rules that you follow.”

Two Strategies You Can Try Next Week

1. Make Thinking Visible with Think-Alouds

The team now uses think-alouds as a teaching tool, not only a research method. Students record a short video narrating their decisions as they work with sources: what they’re reading, why they chose a word, where they’re stuck.

What the authors recommend:

• Go first. Record your own think-aloud working through a source for a paper, or an assignment you’re giving. Vulnerability from the instructor makes it safer for students.

• Keep videos to 3–15 minutes, and start low stakes, shared with one peer.

• Treat it as formative. Karyn uses “cluster grading,” giving feedback across an outline, the think-aloud, and the draft together.

• Name the AI decisions. Think-alouds surface when a student is leaning on AI or translation tools, and whether that’s helping or bypassing their learning.

Paul Michiels, a lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University who teaches composition and professional writing and studies how expert scholars across disciplines use sources, framed the payoff in a line that drew a lot of reactions: “Either GenAI is going to own your thinking, or you’re going to own GenAI in your thinking.”

Try it with Consensus: Ask students to record a think-aloud while they search in Consensus for an assignment. Which query did they start with? Which papers did they open, and why? What did they decide to set aside? The search itself becomes evidence of judgment you can give feedback on.

Try it in your course

Download the ready-to-use Think Aloud: Research a Question You’re Curious About assignment. Students record themselves researching a question in Consensus, check one summary against the original paper, and reflect on the decisions they made.

The Think-Aloud Teaching Kit also includes Bringing Think-Alouds into Your Teaching, an instructor guide with focus prompts, reflection options, accessibility guidance, and low-time feedback strategies. Both resources come in PDF and editable Word formats.

Download the Think-Aloud Teaching Kit at the top of the page.

2. Build Interdependence into the Assignment

In his technical writing course at Carnegie Mellon, Paul Michiels used to see students write instructions for origami or LEGO builds. Now each student writes one sentence on a sticky note: “I would like to know how to…” Groups pick a classmate’s need, research it for several weeks, and write a user guide that the classmate then usability-tests.

The guides quickly turned into source-based writing. One group used Consensus to research when midlife crises tend to happen and what they cost, then built a financial-planning guide for a first-generation classmate. Reading it, the student said, “So it’s all about compounding interest.” Another group wrote a manual for calculating a data center’s monthly greenhouse gas impact.

Drawing on philosopher Casey Rebecca Johnson’s work, Paul offered three questions to ask of any assignment:

Bonus from the Q&A: Paraphrase as Repurposing

Asked how to keep students from outsourcing paraphrase to AI, Paul Michiels shared a three-step progression:

1. Repurpose for a new audience. Take a familiar passage and rewrite it for a 12-year-old, a researcher, or a teacher, so language changes have a reason.

2. Place it in a paragraph. Paraphrases live inside a text, so students decide how it connects to what comes before and after.

3. Reverse-engineer published work. Find a paraphrase in a journal article, track down the source passage, and discuss what the expert changed and why.

Step three is where Consensus fits naturally: students can pull up the cited paper, read it alongside the article, and compare. Paul’s own research on expert paraphrase patterns is a good place to start.

Put it into Practice

Academic integrity becomes teachable when students can see it as something they do, not simply a policy they are expected to follow. That means giving them opportunities to explain their choices, learn from one another, and reflect on how they use sources and tools.

You do not need to redesign an entire course to begin. Start with one research question, one short recording, and one conversation about what students decided and why.

Want to hear more from Karyn Kessler, Paul Michiels, and Paul M. Rogers? Watch the full webinar here.