Bring deliberate practice to your classroom and make more effective digital worksheets

You know worksheets help your students, but you also can tell when students are over them. How do you remedy this so that students acquire the skills and knowledge to succeed in your class? It’s all about how you structure and deliver practice. Read on to see our tips for successfully transferring your class from drill and kill to meaningful and deliberate practice with digital worksheets.

Deliberate practice vs repetition

Often worksheets get a bad reputation because they rely on repetition. Repetition asks students to do the same tasks over and over. The repetition doesn’t involve skill progression and is simply repetitive.

There is an element of skill progression under deliberate practice, where a student may start with a more manageable task and then level up to something more challenging. There is repetition on the right tasks, which targets skills that are more difficult to grasp. The intention in deliberate practice is different than rote repetition.

What makes deliberate practice different from dill and kill?

“Drill and Kill” is an educational concept that includes so much repetition that it can kill the spirit of the student. This leads to a decrease in motivation to learn. Deliberate practice is not to drill and kill, and we will walk you through how to employ the more deliberate practice in your classroom.

Deliberate practice benefits

Deliberate practice has numerous benefits. Here are a few:

- Practice leads to longer knowledge acquisition.
- Students can automatically perform tasks after practice. This frees up the mind to tackle more challenging tasks.
- Students can transfer knowledge that they practice to more complex tasks. This helps with problem-solving.
- Practice helps with deeper thinking so that students can pursue expertise.
- Students who practice and gain knowledge are more motivated.

What should you be doing during instruction to motivate students to practice?

So you know that deliberate practice can be hard to do in your classroom. The first step has to do with instruction and classroom culture. It is up to teachers to bring students to a place that allows the effective practice. This can be done through scaffolding or structuring instruction to build knowledge. Here are a few tips for setting your class up for success:

- Connect practice to performance: Show students how they have improved due to practice. This makes practice more meaningful, and it keeps students more motivated.
- Use scaffolding to connect practice to existing knowledge: When students are frustrated from a poorly designed assignment or one that comes at the wrong time, they lose motivation, and the benefits of the assignment are lost.
- Provide quick feedback: Students absorb feedback and knowledge best when it is fresh in their minds.
- Practice should happen more than once: Students should cultivate skills over time.

5 Tips and strategies for deliberate practice in the classroom

There are many simple modifications to make practice in your classroom more meaningful for you and your students. Try a few (or all!) of these tips today in your classroom.

Model practice with students before expecting independent work

Show students how to do skills before setting them loose on practice. This is a given in math classes but isn’t always straightforward in other classes. You can show students how to do this if you’re modeling close-reading. Break down how to read the question, and then show them how to find the evidence in the text. Talk through every thought in your brain as you do this. It may feel redundant, but it is essential to model thinking in the classroom.

Give your students varied practice frequently

Not all students can acquire knowledge in the exact moment. Give students multiple opportunities to practice a new skill. This also lets other students time to refine their skills. The key to this is to create a variety of practices, so it doesn’t feel redundant to students. Practice will feel more intentional and interesting with variety. With TeacherMade, you can provide students with a variety of question types. It’s easy to make a variety of digital worksheets and assignments.

Deliver just-in-time instruction

There’s a concept in the car manufacturing industry where materials are delivered just in time to go into the car as they go down the assembly line. This way, your factory isn’t cluttered with unnecessary materials that can slow down production. You can apply the same idea to instruction. Don’t overload students with too much information. Wait until students are stuck on a more challenging problem to deliver additional details. This form of scaffolding will provide lessons when students are fully engaged. This leads to higher learning acquisition.

Provide descriptive feedback to students

To make practice feel more meaningful, provide students with descript feedback. Avoid comments such as “good job,” “more detail needed,” or “improve this.” Instead, give specific feedback that correlates to your targeting skills. With TeacherMade, you can provide specific and personalized feedback to students on their digital assignments. You can even leave voice comments!

Reflect on practice

Reflecting on practice as a class is key to creating a culture of more meaningful practice in the classroom. This is different from personalized feedback, but instead, you discuss what was accomplished and gained from the practice. By creating a classroom culture of growth, you ensure that future practice assignments are meaningful.

Use TeacherMade to develop more meaningful digital worksheets in your classroom

TeacherMade is the tool you need to convert your paper assignments to digital worksheets. It’s easy to use TeacherMade.

1. Upload your file. The file you upload becomes the background of your new online worksheet. (We support these file types.)
2. Add fields for student responses.
3. Add answers to questions for self-scoring.
4. Send an assignment link to students or sync with your school’s LMS platform.
5. Get instant feedback and results.

With TeacherMade, you can design deliberate practice in your classroom in a digital format. This gives you the flexibility to ask the right question at the right time.