Some Important Lessons on Worksheet Design

As novice teachers, many of us will be creating much of our curriculum from scratch. The big picture of unit design can be tough enough, but I am learning that even small things like worksheets for class activities present important problems.

I designed a worksheet to guide in-class reading of Romeo and Juliet (act 3, scene 1, the fight scene between Mercutio, Tybalt, and Romeo). The worksheet focused the students on certain motifs, character motivations, and assigning/determining blame for the events of the scene. I felt the content of the worksheet was solid, and my instructions were clear to me. My class (ninth grade mixed-honors) did okay with the worksheet, but could've done much better. Here are the suggestions my mentoring teacher made:

1. Keep directions accessible to all students. Expanding their vocabulary is important, but if you do it in the directions of an assignment, you are stacking cognitive tasks on top of one another, and risking that the students become overwhelmed.

2. Use engaging language when writing directions. In addition to using a manageable vocabulary, avoid dry, academic language; try to write in an engaging way, just as you would speak in an engaging way.

3. Most importantly, provide examples of what you expect their work to look like. In the first worksheet, I asked for lines as examples of the motif discussed; the responses ranged from line numbers, to a few words from a line, to an entire line word for word. Which was right? I don't know; this was another benefit of writing example answers - it forced me to think more clearly about what I wanted students to be doing.

- O+B