You are convinced to stop using worksheets, but that begs the question: What do I do instead? What kinds of activities can I assign that will keep students on task so I can work with groups and yet require them to think deeply?

Using Bloom’s Updated Taxonomy to guide your planning will help to stimulate higher level thinking in your students. Think about it: actually CREATING something–their own version of a book, a machine, an essay or written response–requires a lot more time and effort than simply asking them to remember some information and jot it down on a worksheet.

Requiring students to do activities that are at higher levels has an added benefit: it usually meets a larger number of standards than lower level tasks.

What are some things students can do to show their learning and thinking?

Apply what you read by:

• writing a sequel or new ending.
• illustrating or diagramming
• reorganizing into a chart or table

Analyze what you read by:

• comparing two texts or elements of a text
• categorize something

Evaluate what you read by:

• writing an opinion or persuasive text
• judging something
• ranking something (characters, texts, authors, etc)

Create something based on what you read by:

• writing an original text
• making something related to what you read
• inventing something based on what you read

Higher Level Independent Work Graphic

But does it make him think?

I thought that worksheets were extinct, or at least on the endangered list.  I imagined reading the obituary in the paper: Frank Shaffer (and his cronies) is dead!.  But alas, I still seem worksheets appearing in the habitats of our classrooms.  Sometimes there are herds of them, stapled together in packets. [Did you feel my shudder?]

Worksheets are good for one thing: making students work–keeping them occupied for a period of time so that the teacher can meet with groups or tend to other things. The problem that work is not synonymous with think. One common thread with recent innovations in education, especially the Common Core State Standards, is that students need to develop the ability to think. They need to think about texts and about problems, and be able to apply, synthesize, evaluate, and create. (Sound familiar? These verbs are common to many CC Standards and Bloom’s Taxonomy. So, how do you decide whether to use a worksheet?

Here are some guiding questions.

• Is the worksheet busy work? Are you just assigning it so students have something to do while you work with groups, administer running records, or do something else? If the answer is yes, say no to the sheet.
• Do the students clearly understand what to do? I have been in lots of classrooms in which students are going through the motions of completing an activity without knowing why they are doing it or what it is supposed to do.  Or, even worse, students don’t know what to do so they find other, less productive activities, such as disrupting class.
• Does it allow students to demonstrate learning in specific standards (CCSS)? The goal of any student activity should be to enhance learning and growth in the Standards.
• Can the objective be accomplished with another, more hands-on activity?  Student learning is increased through collaborative and cooperative activities.
• Does this activity require higher level thinking? This is the million dollar question.  Here is the bonus: activities that require higher level thinking often  increase motivation and keep students engaged longer.

This Infographic encourages you to put down that worksheet!

What do you do instead of worksheets? My next blog post will offer some suggestions.

Writing from Sources

Writing from sources is one of the challenges that students face if they are to be Ready for College & Career. As literacy teachers, we have always encouraged students to respond to literature and write about what they read.  The Common Core Standards, however, has made us rethink the idea of exactly what a textual source is. Instead of just thinking about print sources, such as novels, textbooks, articles, etc., we are expecting students to comprehend and assimilate many other types of sources into their writing.

What is a Source?

Textual Sources aren’t just print.  If students can glean information from something, it can be considered a source. Artwork, photographs, websites, video, and other media may be sources.

Writing from Sources Resource

Teaching Writing from Sources

Writing from sources means taking information and ideas from several complex texts to create an original complex text. This may include constructed responses (short written answers) or extended responses (longer, more developed pieces, such as essays) on Smarter Balanced assessments and prose constructed responses (similar to extended responses) on PARCC.

How do students write from sources? How do they organize their writing? What details do they include to prove that they deeply understand the text and the question? What lessons can guide students to successfully write from sources?

• close reading with a pencil
• paraphrasing
• direct quoting
• selecting the correct information
• unlocking the prompt or directions
• synthesizing

To write from sources, students must be able to read closely, ponder the big and supporting ideas in a text, and select the exact details to support their answers. Writing from sources requires students to analyze individual texts as well as compare and synthesize multiple sources. It also means increasing the amount of analytical writing that students do. The writing may be brief, focused pieces or long-term projects. Analytical writing includes opinion/argument or informative/explanatory writing.