Worksheets handouts and activities with purpose
Providing resources for teaching and learning is much easier than it was in the past. Online resources like Teachers Pay Teachers provide venues for teachers to share content they have created. Most of the content on Teachers Pay Teachers is created by other educators. Much of it is available for sale at a modest price. The prices are usually around five dollars or less. There are plenty of free resources too.
I create plenty of content on this site for free. I also create content for Teachers Pay Teachers. The sale of this content helps to fund this website and the materials I use to create content for the site.
One resource I always used in the classroom was worksheets. Worksheets have gotten a bad rap because they were often overused. Sometimes they were used in place of classroom instruction or as filler. The criticism of worksheets is applied to anything that is overused in the classroom without the use of specific measurable outcomes. The digital equivalents are things like Google Classroom, Google Forms, and the endless resources sold to school districts that tout the advantages of using them on a daily basis to raise scores on standardized assessments/tests.
These resources are not bad, they are just used in ineffective ways. A resource is ineffective if it is used without the purpose of obtaining measurable outcomes. Any resource should begin with the question; why am I using this resource? Why am I issuing a handout/worksheet on algebra? If the answer is something like homework or practice, then you are not using the resources to their fullest advantage.
Why am I distributing an exercise in algebra?
I want to measure how much students have learned from my instruction.
I want to find out which students are struggling and where.
I want to measure how much students have retained x weeks or months later.
I want to assess what students know from what they don’t know so I can focus my instruction and student support.
When we distribute an assignment with goals for that worksheet/handout/assignment we turn it into a formative assessment. Anything we do in the classroom should be a formative assessment. We are assessing students and ourselves. We assess students and ourselves during a lesson when we insert a moment to check for understanding. People often refer to it as reading the room.
Worksheets, now often referred to as handouts or activities to reduce the stigma, are useful tools when used the right way. They should be a constant formative assessment tool.
On my site, digitalmaestro.org, I often refer to worksheets/handouts/activities I have created for classroom use. These resources should be used with the purpose of obtaining measurable information that guides your classroom instruction and student support.
