Drafted, deleted, started over. Read her second draft aloud at the kitchen table, argued with her family about aqueducts, and rewrote the ending twice. Every sentence is hers, and so is every scar.
FOR TEACHERS · DISCUSSION LESSON KIT · GRADES 6–9
The Authorship Seminar
This is the lesson plan the keynote shows on stage — complete and classroom-ready. Three students turn in the same polished essay on Rome’s enduring influence. One wrestled, one pasted, one did something harder to name. The seminar hands your students the question every AI policy eventually reaches, and lets them build the answer themselves: what makes work your own?
THEME: AGENCY & AUTHORSHIP · DIALOGUE
When a machine can help, what makes the work your own?
⏱ Quick: 30 min · Standard: 60 min · Deep: two days, with a writing workshop between seminars
THE LAUNCH · READ ALOUD OR PROJECT
Three students, one prompt
The essay prompt was the same for everyone: How does ancient Rome still shape the world you live in? Argue from evidence. Due tomorrow, 9:40 PM.
Copied the prompt into a chatbot, pasted the answer, changed two words, and submitted in five minutes. The essay is excellent. Sam could not tell you what is in paragraph three.
Read the whole prompt, asked the AI to explain what the assignment was really asking, then closed the machine’s draft and wrote his own — every sentence his — over two hours.
The three essays look the same. The question is whether they are the same — and your students, not you, are going to decide what the difference is made of.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
What this seminar builds
- Students will articulate a personal definition of authorship and defend it with reasons drawn from the three cases.
- Students will distinguish between the visible product of writing and the invisible cognitive work that produced it.
- Students will test whether their definition stays consistent when it is applied to a case they did not expect it to cover.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
Ohio’s Learning Standards · ELA, Grade 7 — SL.7.1: engage effectively in collaborative discussions, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly. W.7.1: write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence. The launch essay sits inside the Grade 7 social-studies study of Rome’s enduring influence, so the seminar can land in either classroom.
RUN OF SHOW
The seminar, minute by minute
- Warm-up (3–5 min). On the board before anyone speaks: “Finished work is visible. Thinking is not. Where does YOURS live?” Students jot one sentence.
- The story (5 min). Read the three cases aloud. No commentary, no eyebrow-raising at Sam. The cases do the work.
- The line-up (10 min). Post the four stances in four corners. Students stand at the one closest to their own view, then each corner drafts its strongest sentence together.
- The seminar (20–30 min). Circle up. One rule, said out loud: no verdicts, only reasons. Open with prompt two — the Jordan question — and let the room carry it. Your job is to feed the fire, not to settle it.
- If time. The class drafts its own authorship rule — one sentence they would accept even when it costs them. Post it where the AI policy would go.
THE FOUR STANCES
Where does authorship live?
Authorship lives in the wording. If you did not put the words in that order, the work is not yours — no matter how much you directed the machine that did.
Authorship lives in the deciding. Whoever chose what stays, what goes, and what the piece finally says owns it — editors of their own work are still its authors.
Authorship lives where the effort lived. Ownership follows the wrestling — the drafts, the dead ends, the revision. Work without struggle is borrowed, not owned.
Authorship is a promise kept. Any help can be legitimate — a tutor, a parent, a machine — as long as the help is named and the reader is never misled.
Before choosing: which stance would you most want to push back on — and what is the strongest version of it you could write?
OPEN DISCUSSION PROMPTS
Questions that open the room
- Maya, Sam, and Jordan turned in essays that look equally polished. Is there any difference worth caring about? What is it made of?
- Jordan asked the AI to explain the assignment, then wrote every sentence himself over two hours. What do we call what Jordan did — and why?
- If a machine wrote the sentences but you made every decision about what they should say, whose work is it? What if a parent had done the same thing?
- What rule about AI help would you accept even in the version of the story where it costs you something?
REASONING EXERCISE
Sharpen the argument
- Fallacy to spot — equivocation. “Jordan wrote the essay” and “the AI wrote the essay” can both feel true because wrote is doing two different jobs. Have students name the two meanings before they argue.
- Argument repair. “Either AI is banned or nothing counts as cheating” is a false dilemma. Repair it: add at least two positions between the extremes and name what each one protects.
- Student variation. Invent the fourth student. Design a use of AI that your stance calls legitimate and your neighbor’s stance calls cheating — then trade and argue the other side.
- Related on this site. The Digital Doppelgänger hands students the harder version of the same question.
COMMON DERAILERS & HOW TO REDIRECT
When the seminar wobbles
If: The seminar collapses into “using AI is just cheating, period.”
Try: Bring back Jordan: “Jordan didn’t paste a single machine sentence. If your rule calls Jordan a cheater, are you keeping the rule — or changing it? Either answer is allowed. Defend it.”
If: Students turn to whether they personally would get caught.
Try: “Detection is a different lesson. Today’s question stands even in a world with no detectors at all: if nobody could ever check, what would still make the work yours?”
If: One confident voice starts issuing verdicts on classmates’ stances.
Try: Re-state the seminar’s single rule — no verdicts, only reasons — and hand the verdict-giver a harder job: “Steel-man the stance you just rejected. Give us its best version.”
SENSITIVITIES TO WATCH FOR
- Some students in the room have already used AI in ways they are not proud of. Keep every case fictional and forward-looking; never invite confession, and never let the seminar become a trial of a real classmate.
- Home access differs. Sam’s five minutes and Jordan’s two hours both assume a device and a quiet evening; some students have neither. Keep the discussion about the thinking, not the tools a family can afford.
DIFFERENTIATION
Every student enters the circle
- For ELL students: pre-teach the working vocabulary — authorship, drafting, revision, disclosure — and provide sentence stems: “I stand at ___ because ___.” “My rule would still apply when ___.”
- For IEP/504: provide the four stances in writing before the class period; entering the line-up by checking a box is full participation. A written reason counts the same as a spoken one.
- For advanced students: authorship was never simple. Renaissance masters ran workshops where apprentices painted the backgrounds; composers borrow folk melodies; producers sample records. Research one historical case and argue: did our seminar’s rule cover it?
STUDENT HANDOUT & EXIT TICKET · SINGLE PAGE, NO AI
Where did the thinking live?
The handout is a five-rung ladder. Students apply it to one of the three cases — or, in the Deep version, to their own most recent piece of writing.
Whose question is this answering? Who decided what the piece would claim?
Who chose what comes first, what comes last, and what got left out?
Who put the words in this order? All of them? Some of them?
Who noticed what was weak and made it better? How many times?
Who decided it was done — and would stand behind every line out loud?
EXIT TICKET
One sentence: name the rung of the ladder you believe matters most for ownership, and state one rule about AI help you would keep even when it hurts you.
CROSS-CURRICULAR TIE-INS · AT-HOME EXTENSION
Where the question travels next
- Social studies: Rome itself is a case study — aqueducts built by unnamed engineers, histories written by scribes, speeches delivered by one man and drafted by another. Who is the author of an empire’s ideas?
- ELA: claim, evidence, warrant, counterclaim — the seminar is argument analysis practiced live, with stakes the students actually feel.
- Arts & music: sampling, remixes, studio assistants, film credits. Every art form has already fought this fight. What did each one decide, and would your class agree?
- At home: ask someone in your family to describe a piece of work they are proud of — a meal, a repair, a garden, a spreadsheet. Then ask: what part could someone else have done for you before it stopped feeling like yours? No screen required.
HOW THIS KIT WAS MADE · A WORKFLOW YOU CAN STEAL
AI drafted. A teacher judged every line.
This kit practices what it teaches, and its own ladder applies. The idea, the structure, and the judgment are a teacher’s. An approved AI tool drafted prose against that brief in minutes — and then a teacher accepted, rewrote, or rejected every sentence you just read. That division of labor is the workflow, and it is yours to steal: describe the lesson you can see in your head, let the machine produce the first draft of the parts that are mechanical, and spend the hours you saved where they always belonged — on the questions, the cases, and the judgment calls no machine can make for your classroom.
Three questions govern every step, the same three the keynote leaves on stage: What is this task building? Where can help live? What must stay the student’s? Draft your answers with an approved tool. Decide them with your judgment. Then say them to your students out loud.