Chris Martin. Welcome to this Kosmos Online podcast. I'm Chris ...

Chris Martin. Welcome to this Kosmos Online podcast. I’m Chris Martin, program officer at
IHS, and today I’m speaking with my colleague Dr. Phil Magness, about dealing with
challenging situations with students. Phil, welcome back to Kosmos.
Phil Magness. Thank you for having me.
CM. Phil, you have several years of teaching experience under your belt, both as a graduate
student at George Mason, and as an instructor at American University. What I hope we can do in
this podcast is to identify some pointers that you’ve learned in your years in the classroom about
student interaction, and our hope is that these pointers will be useful for graduate students who
are just starting out with teaching so they can maybe get some advance intelligence of situations
they might encounter. Just to ground us by starting out with an actual situation, Phil could you
tell us about some situation you may have encountered with a student that was difficult, that
initially you were taken aback by, but eventually were able to deal with.
PM. Absolutely. I actually had a student several years ago in a class, and one of the problems
that almost any faculty member encounters is plagiarism, it’s actually a major problem in the
American university system and I suspect the rest of the world as well, but having experience in
previous semesters with plagiarism, I made it very clear in the syllabus at the beginning of the
semester that high standards for citations for work that is turned in. The semester advanced
without incident up until the final part of the class, where I had this one student who, he had
never been a particularly good student through the course of the class, but he turns in the final
exam, and followed all the instructions perfectly on how to cite sources, but he hadn’t been
reading the books the entire semester, the citations that came in were too amazon.com book
reviews of the textbook for the class, so I had a student who based his exam on what Frank in
Cleveland had to say about the Logic of Collective Action, rather than reading the Logic of
Collective Action.
CM. Now was that plagiarism technically, or just a very poorly written exam?
PM. That was a poorly written exam, from a student that probably otherwise would have been
inclined to the plagiarism direction, but because I made it very clear in the beginning of the class
he only got a poor grade as a result, because he followed directions and cited sources, they just
tended to be very poor sources though.
CM. That’s interesting though. In a way it was a kind of limited victory for the forces of good,
very limited because you would rather that he read the material, but at least he didn’t cheat. He
sort of failed honorably, in some bizarre way.
PM. That’s one way to say it (laughter).
CM. Did you have a conversation with the student afterwards?

PM. I did. I made it clear in academia, you are expected to not only use sources reliably, but also
pick your sources credibly, and amazon.com book reviews by Frank in Cleveland do not count.
CM. Do not count. Now, did you ever have that student again?
PM. I did not have that particular student again, but after he left the conversation, he knew why
he got the grade that he did, and was far more accepting of it, just came to the realization that
there are standards of expectations for college-level work.
CM. Phil I think you make a good point. Graduate students assume, this has been drive into us,
that you have to do certain things, but students that come into college these days don’t
necessarily know what the expectations are, so if that somewhat painful experience with that
student inspired them to go forward and do no more wrong, that was worthwhile for him. I think
we can count that as a kind of victory. So for future classes did you sort of mention that
situation?
PM. Oh I did not only mention that story for the plagiarism talk about your sources, but cite good
sources, and here’s an example of what happens when you don’t cite good sources. It made for a
good teaching moment for subsequent classes.
CM. Great, great. In a way, then, it’s almost the perfect outcome, you handled it appropriately in
the moment, a student learned something, and you were able to improve your future practice to
help mitigating against that thing occurring. Actually, Phil, from this example, maybe this can be
our paradigm for our conversation, what I want to propose is certain categories for difficult
student situations that you might encounter for students in the classroom, and then you can share
for us sort of a concrete story for what actually happened, and then some of your thoughts about
how both to deal with similar situations and how to mitigate them in the future.
PM. Absolutely
CM. So I’ll propose some categories and you can let me know if you think those are sufficient. I
have four that I wrote down here: disruptive behavior in the classroom. Second, cheating or
dishonest, which we’ve partially covered. Third, requests to bend the rules, students who want
extensions or special treatment. Fourth, honest difficulty in grasping material, so this would not
be a question on moral or on ethical behavior, but this student is just moving at a different speed
from the rest of the class. Do those seem like four good categories for us to cover?
PM. Absolutely
CM. The first one, this is probably the most challenging and probably the most common,
disruptive classroom behavior. So start us off with an example where this occurred either for you
or for someone you know.

PM. Absolutely. I actually had a colleague that had a very strong example of this. We were coteaching
a class as grad students, as Teaching Assistants, but we had each been given a section,
and a student in the classroom decided very early on 1) she did not like my colleague personally
and 2) she did not like the course material, and therefore every time the course turned to a class
discussion, she would stand up and raise her hand and just make some over-the-top remark about
why she did not consider even the basic premise of the course even worthy of study. It just
turned into an entirely disruptive scenario for two to three weeks on end, to the point of dealing
with this student, so my colleague asked me for advice, he asked other members of the
department for advice on how to deal with her. It ended up being a situation where he had to just
set her down aside from class and just say, “Listen, you understand you know you are here
voluntarily to take this particular class, you are free to drop it at any time you like, but if you
continue this type of behavior, it’s becoming disruptive and imposing on the other students, and I
hope you just understand that that’s the cost of engaging in this type of behavior.”
CM. And what was her response?
PM. From what I was told, she definitely quieted down at that point and encountered the student
in particular one evening after class several of us decided to go get dinner down the street at a
local restaurant, and she also happened to be in there with her boyfriend, immediately spotted my
colleague and just stared him out, just staring daggers at him the entire course of the dinner.
CM. This wasn’t a complete success because there was still kind of this bitterness, but it sounded
like your colleague did the right thing in trying to intervene against that behavior, because that
was probably burning up a lot of class time.
PM. Right, right. To the point that other students were having the value that they derive from the
class impeded upon by this one student’s behavior. The best advice they could give there is to
put a stop to it early on, especially if it becomes sufficiently disruptive that other students are
being penalized by it because that’s the real cost of that type of behavior.
CM. Perhaps we could break this down a bit more. Now, I don’t have any formal training in this
area, but I talked to someone who was a religious youth group leader, and she had a number of
stages for dealing with behaviors, and I remember the first was to privately note the behavior to
the offending party, the second was to confront them aggressively privately, and the third step
was a public confrontation or rebuke, so it was sort of an escalating level of intervention,
eventually using the shame of the peer group against the person. Do you think that would be a
good approach? Have you used that yourself?
PM. Absolutely, it would depend entirely on the circumstance of the student, but if a student is
becoming increasingly disruptive in class and not responding to any of the signals that you’re
sending, it may be worthwhile to bring the situation out more publicly, at the instance of
disruption in the class.

CM. It would probably depend on how severe the misbehavior was. If it was a situation where
other student being immediately threatened, not just physically threatened but threatened with
some verbal disrespect, you would have to intervene immediately. Have you ever had to involve
the administration in a classroom disruption issue?
PM. Not directly in classroom disruption, more so with some other problems, with academic
dishonesty, cheating that kind of thing.
CM, But usually with just the misbehavior it’s sufficient to correct?
PM. Right, right. You have a group going on, we’ve gotten into some very heated political
debates, the classes I teach are mostly in policy, political science or political history, so there’s a
lot of room for disagreement, and people get very passionate about issues, sometimes those
passions overwhelm the discussion, but that’s the point where the instructor should be the person
who steps in and kind of guides the discussion back onto track and 99% of the time that
sufficiently works to diffuse the situation.
CM. Now how would you do that? Would you do that with a mini-monologue about the issue
involved, would you pose a question?
PM. Normally, if a student is really going off-base or berating one of his or her colleagues for a
point that was made, that’s the time to step in as the instructor and guide the terms of the
discussion back onto more of a civil point. You know, it could even be a comment of saying,
“Let’s keep this away from something personal” and onto the particular arguments that are being
made.
CM. That’s a great point, and actually as you’ve seen in our IHS seminars, we’ll even say
explicitly at the start of seminars, it’s about the idea, not about the person. It’s not the ad
hominem sort of attack. But you’re right; the instructor needs to be the grown-up in the room, in
a way, for these students…Are there any other strategies can you think of to address disruptive
behavior? On the first day of class, do you tell students, for example, when to pose questions
during the lecture? Do you say, “hold your questions til’ the end of the lecture, interrupt in the
middle, raise your hand”?
PM. I normally let them know, the first day of class, we have a general talk about the discussion
environment that’s going to play out during the course of the semester, I let them know that since
it is a politically-oriented class, there will be times when discussion is appropriate, and that
discussion is in fact welcomed within these boundaries. For a particular class, I normally try to
structure the lecture, I’ll write it out on the board what I’m trying to do, and it’ll be maybe the
first twenty minutes of the lecture are on a particular topic. Then we have time set aside for
discussion and an assignment that follows, so it’s clear before the opportunity even arises, what
the appropriate time is to hold that discussion will tend to be.

CM. That’s a good system. So the board-based outline. Another issue that comes to mind, that
you and I, and many of our listeners, have a classical liberal commitment, I guess you could say
we find those ideas powerful. Have you ever had classroom disruption issues tied specifically to
the student feeling that you were classical liberal and they were opposed to that?
PM. I normally start the classes; I don’t hide the fact that I lean classical liberal. If any student
asks me, “What are your philosophical beliefs?,” I am ready to identify in that camp, but at the
same time, I make it known very clearly at the outset of the class that other ideas are welcome. I
want an open exchange, and as long as anyone can articulate their particular position with good
arguments, sound arguments behind it, that’s welcome.
CM. That, I think, is the position that the best instructors that I know take. You can be
completely opposed to what I, the instructor believes, it’s the quality of your arguments that
matter. That’s a great rule. I think we’ve probably covered disruptive classroom behavior, so
why don’t we move on to issues of cheating or dishonesty. We had one that was sort of a
halfway-there failure to grasp the premise, is there another story that has to do with an actual
transgressions of the rules?
PM. As I’ve said, plagiarism is rampant, in most universities, from the highest level of the Ivy
League all the way down to general state universities. Plagiarism occurs, it’s widely discussed in
academia, and I have had several instances of it in the past. One I encountered when I was
teaching a class, a particular student turned in a paper, this was a student I had granted an
extension to out of extenuating circumstances, had requested extensions. It’s already a late
assignment; I had already given a lot of leeway to this particular student. She turned in a paper
where, I’m reading through it as she’s meeting in my office in the office hours to present her
work, and it became immediately evident that she had plagiarized large portions of this paper,
actually lifted them off of a report that had been published by a state government, and she went
through and she changed most of the references to that state government to another political
jurisdiction, which happened to be the topic of her paper.
CM. Not only was it plagiarism, it was actually data that was inappropriate to the thesis of her
class, doubly absurd.
PM. The way that I caught this, I was reading through her charts and graphs she had concluded
in this paper as she was sort-of giving this mini-breakdown of it to me, and I noticed right away
one of the footers of a chart had the wrong political jurisdiction on it, and I asked her about and
said, “This was kind of strange, this chart refers to this city, and you’re saying it pertains to
another state.” She didn’t have a very good answer for that, so that was red flag #1 that I should
run this through the software that we subscribe to as a university for detecting plagiarism. Sure
enough, I did it and immediately afterwards a direct indicator that she had lifted large sections of
her paper directly from an online source.

CM. What action did you take at that point?
PM. So that’s the point when you normally turn to either involving the department or the
administration, and each department’s different, they’re going to have different policies for how
to deal with that kind of a subject. Some departments will handle it internally, others pass it off
to somewhere else in the school, normally that takes it out of your hands directly for anything
beyond the grade, but departments tend to engage with the faculty member in such a way that
they’ll reach a resolution to the case, which either involves assigning whatever the prescribed
grade happens to be for plagiarism, or do you take it before an academic review, an intellectual
policy organization that the university itself has set up.
CM. It sounds like once you trigger that official process, which we can presume it’s going to be a
little different for every host institution. For people who are listening, your department’s specific
policies would vary and you can discover them, but it does sound like there could be instances
where there’s a bit of a moral choice for you as the instructor to make. Depending on the severity
of the problem, once you trigger that process it’s out of your hands, and it also sounds like it
requires a lot of time and energy on your part to engage with the process. Do you think there’s
ever a justifiable circumstance where you might handle it yourself?
PM. Rule of thumb, if it’s a major case of cheating, a major case of plagiarism, that’s when I
would take that step of going through the department procedures. You know, I lay this out on my
syllabus, this is another good technique, and some departments even require this, to state in
advance at the beginning of the class, “This is the department policy on plagiarism, if you violate
it, these are the consequences” so that it’s clear in everyone’s mind. In certain circumstances, if
it’s a very minor instance, or if it’s something, you know, it’s questionable if they had a slipup or
maybe they forgot to cite a force, and it’s not the thrust of the paper. If they’re turning in a tenpage
paper and there’s a single quotation, I’d handle that differently than if five of the ten pages
were copied off of the internet. It’s really just using discretion on a case-by-case basis, and on
that smaller instance, that may be the appropriate time to approach the student directly, see if
there’s a plausible explanation, use common sense.
CM. I think that’s a good point, that you don’t necessarily want to drop the hammer on every
individual situation that occurs. I had a challenging problem that I encountered in economics
class. I don’t know, Phil, if you’ll have a suggestion for me here or for our listeners, but a
student, actually two students, Chinese-exchange students folks, so English was not there first
language and they had some particular challenge with the technical vocabulary. They asked me
on an exam if they could use a Chinese-English dictionary, a small hand-held electronic device.
They asked me the day of the exam, and I sort of in the moment said, “Well, let me check it to
make sure there are no equations stored in here.” Now, of course it was in Chinese, so I was
completely unable to verify this, and later I thought, “You know, I probably didn’t handle that
optimally. Perhaps what I should have done is advanced a policy about that in advance.” Have
you ever had any similar situations with dictionaries, cellphones?

PM. Not so much straight up with dictionaries, sometimes laptops even just in the general course
of the class. It’s becoming in vogue to have a laptop sitting there in their class. Some will be
surfing Facebook, others will be legitimately taking notes and there is no real way, other than
walking around the back of the classroom to know exactly what they’re doing, but you have to
wonder if you’re giving, you’re holding a discussion in class, and a lot of classes have
participation components in them that are graded, is someone looking up the answer to a
particular question on the internet right then and there, is that giving them an unfair crutch? My
way of addressing it is allowing students to use their laptop as a valuable tool, but stating up
front that quite aware of the downside, to the negative side of this tool might abuse it, and if you
become, if it becomes very visible that you are googling the answer to every single question
that’s asked, then I may step in and ask you to set the laptop aside.
CM. And as long as there’s a credible threat of you doing that, you don’t have to do that often,
you just have to do it enough to make it obvious.
PM. I actually had one professor that I studied under, and he had this technique that if he noticed
a student was using his or her laptop too much in class, he would intentionally walk down the
aisle and unplug it as a result (laughter).
CM. That’s an interesting strategy. As long as you don’t knock the computer onto the floor.
PM. He was very deft at doing this, and it was always a good laugh when it happened.
CM. It’s too bad we don’t have a laser beam to disable it, a small EMP device. Maybe we can
transfer to issues of what I’m calling rules-bending requests, where the student comes to you and
they give you the tale of woe, and the tale of woe, might involve health or other classes, but it
doesn’t quite rise to the level of a health emergency, which I think most instructors have a
policy. How much do you accommodate requests like that, for more time on a problem set, for
more time to finish a paper, what’s the best approach there?
PM. At the very beginning of the class, I state upfront, “If there are extenuating circumstances
that mean you may not be able to get a paper in on time, as long as you let me know in advance,
prior to the day of the deadline, I will do what I can to reasonably accommodate you.” Normally
that may mean a couple days extension, depending on the circumstance, but I’ll evaluate on a
case-by-case basis. The real problem for me, is when a student comes up on the actual due date
of the paper and is coming up with excuses, or asking for extensions, I’m less lenient in that
situation.
CM. Because clearly they could have anticipated it.
PM. Right, so as just a personal courtesy, if students are willing to let me know in advance, I am
normally willing to give something in return.

CM. Is there a danger that students who happen to be very creative or plausible with their
excuses can use that to get an advantage over their colleagues who are plodding along?
PM. Absolutely. If it becomes a recurring pattern for a student, or if the excuses, the requests
become increasingly implausible, then that’s the time to use discretion to say no.
CM. Have you ever had a student miss a final exam?
PM. I’ve had a late final exam turned in, normally if they have not made some sort of prior
arrangement with me, I stick with a hard and fast rule of docking off say 10 points per day that
it’s late . It’s normally announced in advance that that’s going to be what the penalty is.
CM. That seems fair enough, that’s a rule of law-compatible way of dealing with the problem.
PM. You aren’t entirely excluding them, you aren’t giving them a 0 because the exam’s due a
day prior, but at the same time they aren’t getting an advantage over their other colleagues who
actually followed the deadline.
CM. I think a potentially challenging situation is a proctored-exam, an in-person exam and the
student doesn’t show. That hasn’t happened to me before but I can imagine, especially you and I
both live in the Washington D.C. area where traffic can be extremely unpredictable and
extremely heavy. This may not be an issue at other universities, but I can imagine a student being
late, or having an auto accident. My approach, and I wonder what you think of this is that you
have to document whatever happened to you. If it was a traffic accident, you have to have a
police report or an insurance report, if you are stuck on I-66 for 4 hours you need a news report
showing that’s where you were.
PM. Which does happen in DC.
CM. Maybe the most common category of difficult student situations is not dishonesty or
dishonorableness on the part of the student, but simply the fact that they are having trouble
grasping the material, they’re moving at a different pace from the rest of the class. So, you as the
instructor have to decide how much of your time to invest to help them out. Do you have a
specific situation you could share with us?
PM. Absolutely, I’ve actually had this multiple semesters, where a student has fallen behind in
the course material, or is having trouble keeping up with what the lessons happen to be each
week. It’s not through any particular negligence on the part of that student, that student is coming
to class and trying to participate, trying to follow the lecture material, but for whatever reason
doesn’t happen to be grasping the concept. Normally, what I start out to do, is I offer to the
student a printed-out version of my notes, so that student has a resource there that he or she can
take their own notes on as the course presents itself, and also refer back to, so it’s a point of
comparison for previous weeks. It gives structure to what I’m presenting in lecture material in
front of the class. Normally that’s the first step, and nine times out of ten that is sufficient for

getting that student up to speed. In other cases, sometimes there’d be an extenuating
circumstance, sometimes a student’s not very good with math, or not a strong writer. That’s
when you start investigating other resources that your department offers. A lot of universities
have a writing center that is specifically there to help students polish up on their writing skills.
When I’ve encountered that kind of student in the past, I’ll normally give them the contact
information, provide them with directions and get their next paper taken through the writing
center before they turn it in.
CM. Many students are unaware of those resources, or they’re only peripherally aware of it.
You’re specifically directing them to that, that can be a big help. Has that generally been
successful for these students?
PM. For the most part it has. I see an improvement in writing over the semester for students that
I’ve sent off to that resource. I have had some circumstances, especially in the more technicalintensive
classes where large groups of students are having trouble with the mathematical econ.
In those circumstances I’ve set aside time outside of class where maybe five or ten students can
come and meet me during office hours and we’ll find a classroom and work through it again. It’s
really a case-by-case basis, but trying to be flexible to accommodate the needs of students, it’s a
good teaching practice, because at the end of the semester you want them to learn the material.
CM. In a way that’s your job. I wanna just comment on two things that strike me as particularly
valuable: delegation and economies of scale. The writing center or the math tutor represents
delegation that you yourself don’t have to be an individualized helper, necessarily to the student
because you have your own demands of time. You can’t necessarily be spending hours and hours
of time with a single student. Then, with the math you mentioned, helping ten students at once
takes really not that much more effort than helping one student. That’s a way you could really
leverage your time. Another thing you mentioned that I felt was really valuable pointing out was
the notes. Phil, I wonder, do you think that most students coming into college have had a class in
note-taking or study skills?
PM. At the undergraduate level definitely not. Maybe very rarely you’ll get some student who
had a higher-level, advanced-placement style course where they are pretty advanced at taking
notes. But for the most part, it’s a very new concept for students that are coming in.
CM. I think that this is a decision, not necessarily of the individual instructors but of the
institutions. It’s certainly out there, but there’s rarely a course actually in it. I think the only
course I’ve ever had formally in it as in middle school, it was woven into a social studies course.
There’s a book, and you probably have other ones too, I believe the author is Pauk, it’s How to
Study in College. We can find that and post it on the website when we do the podcast, but it’s an
extremely useful book, I found it helpful for graduate school, which, hey a little embarrassing,
but it’s better to get good techniques at some point rather than never. One of the techniques that

was particularly useful was writing recall questions in the margins of the notes. So that’s
probably why you’re providing the notes to the student was particularly useful.
PM. They have something that they can both track the lecture and add their own point of inquiry
to.
CM. It helps them for studying. Do you find that it’s helpful to be very clear about the
prerequisites to your class in advance, for example the mathematical preparation?
PM. I do, I do. Especially that first session of the class, because you’re really setting the
standards of what you as the instructor expect of your students, and also what the university’s
interaction with this particular class is, where does it fit into their program. Setting out those
kind-of ground rules on the first day of class, and I’m not saying bring in your syllabus and go
through it point-by-point, but have some sort of structure in your content that sets those ground
rules out there, so the students should know what they should be expecting, you have them on
the same page of what you are expecting of them.
CM. Very helpful. Well Phil, we’ve covered sort of our four topics. Are there any sort of final
pointers that you want to give to any listeners out there, maybe getting ready for their first class,
anything particular to watch out for?
PM. I’ll say it is a learning process. You will encounter problems that you probably never
expected. The best way to deal with those is don’t become flustered by them, sidetracked by a
problem as it emerges, but figure out how it can fit in and prepare for the future. It’s really
learning by doing.
CM. Well Phil thank you very much for your time. We haven’t covered all the vast realms of
issues, but we hope that we’ve identified a few issues that will be helpful for those of you who
are starting out teaching or maybe have been teaching for some time. So thank you again, and for
more career advice, feel free to visit Kosmosonline.org. Kosmos: connecting the network of
liberty-advancing academics.