Worksheets are standard fare in schools, and when used effectively they can help to facilitate the learning process and tell us a lot about student understanding. When used incorrectly, we have ‘death by worksheets’ where both student and teacher get little out of the activity.  Jennifer Gonzalez over at Cult of Pedagogy has a great blog discussing the difference between ‘busysheets’ and ‘powersheets.’ She offers a bunch of excellent alternatives to worksheets. But assuming you are committed to them, let’s work inside that box and build a better one.

Firstly, having the learning goal at the top helps our students to understand why they are engaging with the work. It is also useful for teachers when constructing it since if there is a task that does not explicitly relate to the learning goal, it should be removed. Doing this helps everyone keep focused on what they are doing and why they are doing it. 

One of the issues with worksheets is that they can be a little overwhelming to students when they are packed with items for completion. The task seems monumental so it is difficult to even get started. An easy way around it is to chunk it into task cards. Each card has an item or two and when students finish one, they get the next. This is a very manageable way to break up the items so it doesn’t seem like a wall of text and make them shut down upon seeing it. It also gives them a feeling of accomplishment as they complete each set and feel like they are progressing.

If you want to really get clever with it you can design the tasks so that their performance and understanding determines the next card they get. As an example, let’s say you have a series of 5 cards where the tasks get progressively more difficult. A student who aces the first task may be able to skip to card 4 or 5 rather than work the sequence. A student who struggles with card 1, may want to partner up for card 2. You can get students to design cards of their own to design questions at different levels and activate their deeper thinking. In this instance, progression through the cards will tell you when students meet resistance and allow you to adjust your lessons to compensate accordingly. If you are worried about students moving through the items too quickly then be ready with some enrichment activities or passion projects for those who finish early.

Another idea with chopping up the worksheet, is to post the different questions around various locations in the classroom or the school. Now you have movement incorporated and you have a nice scavenger hunt happening. Again, an easy way to ratchet the difficulty up or down is to color code some of the items and give different students different items to find depending on their ability level. 

To gamify it you can create a digital escape room, use apps like Kahoot, Blooket, etc and you might even turn it into some fun for the kids. When I was teaching full time, these worksheets took the form of a Jeopardy! style of review and the class was able to play in teams. Same questions, different format. When it comes to gamification, let your creativity guide you. Also, involve the students, they have some great ideas as well.

All this helps with some of the format of the worksheet, but what about the content?

Taking a focused exploration of a learning outcome and delving deeply into it can be a solid use of a worksheet. This should not be just similar levels of questions simply asked over and over again (eg. solve 30 of the following mixed fractions), but rather a scaffolded and tiered approach where mastery of early items can lead into mastery of more complex items. It also should absolutely not be a copy and paste task where students simply move information from one place to another (eg, copying terms out of the back of a book) since there is extremely limited evidence that this leads to any learning or retention.

Similarly, worksheets can accompany activities, such as a lab where questions relate to the hands on piece that they are doing so they can solve them as they progress through the activity. In this way, they can be an invaluable scaffold for students to help guide them through the material as the difficulty of the questions increases. Or, they can be used as a follow up to the activity to gauge understanding of the connections they have made through the activity.

Finally, a reflection component at the end helps them to assess their own learning.. A self- assessment component to the work can be a powerful way to promote students taking ownership of their own learning. This may be as simple as asking ‘what have you learned?’ or more structured through use of a rubric. Using this as a discussion piece with students can offer valuable insight into what they have learning and what they have left to learn.

These are some relatively easy changes that can be made to worksheets that help to make them more meaningful and engaging. I’m not suggesting that we abandon them entirely, but we can absolutely do a better job with using them. Oh, and booklets and packets are really just a bunch of worksheets stapled together so we can do better with those too!