Writing to Families After an Academic Integrity Incident
The hardest email many teachers write all year is the one that says, in effect, "your child didn't do their own work." It is easy to get it wrong in both directions: too harsh, and the family gets defensive; too vague, and nobody knows what happened or what comes next.
Start with why students cheat
It helps to remember what the research says about cheating before writing a word. Denise Pope of Challenge Success, whose surveys of high school students go back more than 15 years, reports that 60 to 70 percent of students say they engaged in at least one cheating behavior in the previous month, and that the figure stayed about the same, or dipped slightly, after ChatGPT arrived.
Pope's explanation of the causes is useful: students who are struggling without help, overloaded with work, faced with assignments that feel like busywork, or afraid of letting their family down. She describes cheating as "generally a symptom of a deeper, systemic problem."
None of that excuses the choice. It does suggest a tone: this is a problem to solve together, not a verdict on a child's character.
What the message needs
Keep it short and factual. Five parts:
- What happened, in one or two sentences, without adjectives. "On Tuesday's essay, large sections matched an online source without citation."
- How you know. The evidence, briefly.
- What happens next. The school's policy and what the student will do: redo the work, meet with you, complete a short reflection.
- What you are not assuming. "This doesn't define who your child is."
- An invitation. A time to talk, and how to reach you.
Talk to the student before the message goes out, if at all possible. Families should never hear about it from the teacher first.
What to leave out
Leave out speculation about motive, comparisons to other students, and anything you would not say with the student sitting next to you. Assume the email will be read aloud at the kitchen table, because it probably will.
If you want wording to start from, these academic integrity email templates cover the message to the student, the family and an administrator.
Sources
- Stanford Graduate School of Education, "What do AI chatbots really mean for students and cheating?" (interview with Denise Pope, Challenge Success): https://ed.stanford.edu/news/what-do-ai-chatbots-really-mean-students-and-cheating
Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes.