I remember in high school being reminded over and over how important it was to avoid plagiarism, defined as using an author’s own words or ideas as your own in writing assignments. It was sometimes a challenge for me to come up with another way to explain things and I remember often feeling frustrated and stumped. Now I know why! As someone who uses a visual learning system, as do all my students at INSL LLC as well as 95% of the overall population, I must make my own meaning of words and ideas to understand them well. That involves exploring the layers of words, phrases, new vocabulary, or unknown information. With my students at INSL LLC, together we discuss such ideas from a text, look up definitions, images or videos, and then draw and write about the ideas. Often, I will draw at least three different ways to show an idea (word) before my student draws, but most of the time the student will say “I have an idea!” before I finish. I love those moments, because then I know they have made their own mental picture of the idea and when they draw their own picture, they attach the idea (in the form of a word) to other neurons in their brain. That conceptual connection will last much longer than if they had only copied the word as a pattern from their brain stem, which is forgotten as soon as another pattern is introduced. After understanding new words or phrases in context from a text, our students are then able to rewrite the meaning of the text in their own words. When they read their writing back, it is authentically their own version of the information or story. Now I can see the huge benefit our students will have as they work through schooling- to know what they need to do to avoid plagiarism, to be able to paraphrase easily, and to look at multiple angles of an idea.  Ideally, this process plays out with someone else who can help clarify and revise their thinking (while also helping that person add layers of understanding), and then to draw and write about their thinking. Only once have I noticed a student use a term that was straight from the text, and when I asked about it, he was shocked, “that was in the story?!” Our students are learning a very essential life skill I wish I had been more confident with in my own schooling. It is very rewarding to witness it first-hand now, and to know this superpower will serve them well.