In the last decade, ready-made worksheets have flooded classrooms—accelerated by the aftermath of COVID-19 and fueled by thriving internet marketplaces such as TeachersPayTeachers. Given the demands and pressures placed on educators, who can blame teachers for turning to worksheets? But worksheets can too easily become a crutch, replacing meaningful instructional tasks that demand critical and creative thinking from students.
Research has demonstrated how worksheets can narrow thinking tasks, stifle curiosity, and prioritize compliance (Marshall & Drummond, 2006; Niemiec & Ryan, 2009). And common sense tells us that accurate completion of a worksheet doesn’t equate to active learning. Moreover, many worksheets are written at an inappropriate reading level or use complicated directions that provide an unclear snapshot of student learning, especially for English language learners and struggling readers (Freeman et al., 2014). It can be difficult to know if a student failed to complete a worksheet because they didn’t understand the content or just weren’t able to follow the directions.
This culture of worksheets is snowballing with the introduction of AI-generated materials. Although a teacher can prompt the creation of such a worksheet within seconds, they may overlook critical instructional tenets in the process. Educators must consider whether a worksheet is prioritizing inquiry or merely asking students to recall information. When a worksheet is the instructional centerpiece, students’ curiosity quickly flattens—and so, too, does their thinking. The educational dilemma is not the sheet of paper itself, but rather the pedagogy of the teacher using the worksheet (Krombaß & Harms, 2008; Mortensen & Smart, 2007). The sooner teachers realize that a worksheet can’t do the teaching, the better.
A Required Shift
Imagine if teachers could replace worksheets with blank pages and give students the tools they need to organize and make sense of their understanding. Imagine if they could replace worksheets with rich discussion protocols that prioritize curiosity and collaboration. Teachers can cultivate an environment of deep thinking and curiosity, but doing so requires systematic shifts in pedagogy. Three evidence-based practices can help teachers ditch the worksheet and recover thinking-rich instruction.
Curiosity Catalyst 1: Sketchnoting
Sketchnoting requires students to organize, summarize, and elaborate on their thinking by sketching. Mike Rohde (2014) coined the term as a result of his own struggles with traditional note-taking. Sketching out ideas may include a variety of headers, boxes, arrows, and symbols that serve as cognitive reminders for the note-taker.
Students who can represent ideas and concepts visually acquire deeper understanding than students who just read.
Imagine a student who struggles with reading while learning about cell mitosis. Instead of slogging through a dense worksheet outlining each stage, the student is given a blank page and an invitation to be curious. As they listen and read about the topic, they sketch the process like a cartoonist: chromosomes lining up like characters, arrows looping back to show repetition, and captions reflecting what they think is happening. Because the drawing remains incomplete and evolving, curiosity naturally emerges. The student begins to wonder, Why do the chromosomes split here but not earlier? What would happen if this step were skipped? Why does this stage look different from the last one? Sketchnoting is about ideation, not about the individual’s drawing ability.
A growing body of research on the effects that drawing has on learning emphasizes how this practice leads to increased comprehension and transfer of knowledge (Cromley et al., 2020). Sketchnoting is a powerful classroom practice because it’s multimodal: It requires listening while sketching. When sketchnoting, students are not passively copying notes into a worksheet as they hear them, but rather constructing their own understanding through visual representation (Ainsworth & Scheiter, 2021).
Sketchnoting can happen collaboratively among students on a roll of paper or on a whiteboard spanning a classroom wall, or as a student’s independent practice in a sketchbook or journal. Students can also use online drawing tools, choosing specific colors, fonts, lines, shapes, and icons to support their synthesis of knowledge.
Drawing has been shown to improve recall twice as effectively as writing out definitions (Wammes et al., 2016). Marzano and colleagues (2001) referred to drawing as a “non-linguistic representation” of a student’s understanding. Mental pictures form when a student draws, resulting in greater retention of knowledge. For example, when learning about the water cycle, a student might sketch evaporation as wavy lines rising from a lake, condensation as clouds growing heavier, and precipitation as rain falling back to the ground. Rather than memorizing vocabulary terms, the student retains a visual sequence of the phases. This is particularly important for English language learners and students with a speech or language impairment because drawing can be the nonverbal bridge that enables them to communicate their understanding. Adoniou (2012), who worked with newly arrived English learners, found that drawing before writing improved their scores on informational and explanatory writing.
Curiosity Catalyst 2: Thinking Maps
To get a practice like sketchnoting socialized in a classroom, teachers can try thinking maps. Thinking maps provide a strong cognitive framework for sketchnoting and also fuel student curiosity. Similarly, having students generate their own thinking maps can be a far more powerful teaching strategy than a worksheet. The act of construction encourages students to wonder which ideas matter, what belongs next, what details are most important, and how their thinking might expand. Nesbit and Adesope (2006) showed that students who could represent ideas and concepts visually acquired deeper understanding than students who just read.
Teachers can teach students how to create a thinking map, such as a bubble map, as early as in kindergarten. Kindergartners thrive when asked to draw a big “main idea” circle in the center of the page and lines radiating out with smaller circles for each key detail. Even a kindergartner who cannot yet write words about their pet dog can begin to organize their writing by sketching a detail in each radiating bubble. Thinking maps ignite curiosity by making learning never-ending and expandable. Students are not filling in answers; they are constructing meaning.
Eight thinking maps—the circle map, bubble map, double bubble map, tree map, brace map, flow map, multi-flow map, and bridge map—can routinely be used in K–12 classrooms (Long & Carlson, 2011). It’s best to introduce them progressively with intention. For example, in kindergarten, you may focus on the bubble map (for describing), the tree map (for categorizing), and the flow map (for sequencing). By 2nd grade, students should be able to use a double bubble map (for comparing and contrasting) and a multi-flow map (for analyzing cause and effect).
For example, after reading a story about a tiger surviving a powerful storm in the jungle, a teacher might introduce a bubble map to help students describe how the tiger adapts. Instead of answering questions on a worksheet, students draw a large circle in the center of the page labeled “scared tiger in the jungle.” Radiating outward, they sketch or label details such as “strong legs,” “sharp claws,” “striped fur,” and “hiding in thick plants.” As students add ideas, they begin to wonder, How do stripes help the tiger during a storm? Where does the tiger go to stay safe? What other animals might struggle more in the same storm? The teacher should consistently think aloud about the purpose of the thinking map, not just about the visual structure itself. This provides students with the “why.” Students see the map as a tool for exploration rather than as a task to complete. The open structure of the bubble map invites curiosity, encouraging students to expand, revise, and deepen their thinking in ways a generic worksheet rarely does.
A student creates a bubble map about animal adaptations after looking at the painting Tiger in a Tropical Storm by Henri Rousseau. Photo courtesy of Jessica Rosa Espinoza.
A core principle of thinking maps is to use them routinely. A study conducted by Reilly and Ross (2019) found that schools regularly using thinking maps were twice as likely to surpass average student achievement scores in math and reading. Another key principle of thinking maps is their universality across the curriculum. A student who draws a cause-and-effect thinking map to replay events in a story could also consider using this way of thinking for a math problem or a period in history.
Curiosity Catalyst 3: Artful Thinking Routines
Curiosity is tangible when students are invited to closely observe and interpret something visually. Imagine, for example, students examining one of Claude Monet’s famous Water Lilies paintings using a See, Think, Wonder routine. As students observe the colors, textures, and reflections on the surface of the pond, they begin to wonder what might live beneath the water, what happens to fallen leaves in the pond, and how organisms break down plant matter over time. These observations lead students to infer the presence of decomposers within the ecosystem, which is not explicitly depicted in the artwork.
In this Artful Thinking Routine, “See, Think, Wonder,” students use sticky notes to explore their thoughts and questions about Claude Monet’s Water Lilies painting. Photo courtesy of Jessica Rosa Espinoza.
When students engage with visual art in this unexpected way, discovery occurs. The artwork becomes a catalyst for curiosity, prompting students to ask questions, make inferences, and connect scientific concepts to visual evidence. A variety of visual literacy strategies exist, notably Harvard University’s Project Zero Artful Thinking Routines, which provide evidence-based protocols to use in K–12 classrooms. These protocols center on six thinking dispositions:
- Observing and describing.
- Questioning and investigating.
- Reasoning.
- Exploring viewpoints.
- Comparing and connecting.
- Finding complexity. (2006)
These routines make student thinking visible and encourage students to slow down and notice what they see and think. Further, thinking routines can provide teachers with a formative assessment of the impact of their teaching, enabling them to see far more than a worksheet can reveal. For example, the thinking routine Step Inside(Project Zero, 2019) requires students to “step inside” an artwork, into the role of a character or an object, and use their senses to describe the following:
- What can the person or thing perceive?
- What might the person or thing know about or believe?
- What might the person or thing care about?
Students might be asked to consider Norman Rockwell’s famous painting, The Problem We All Live With, which depicts a Black six-year-old, Ruby Bridges, being escorted by U.S. Marshals to her first day at a newly integrated, previously all-white New Orleans school in 1960. The teacher could ask students how Ruby might be perceiving the event. Students are no longer asking, What is this? but instead, What would it be like to be in this situation? What might I notice, feel, or wonder? This shift from observer to participant provokes questions and deeper inquiry. This routine demands that students think from various viewpoints, which also sharpens their narrative writing skills and conceptual understanding of point of view.
A Better Structure for Deep Learning
With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence shaping how we operate as a society, now more than ever, educators need to prioritize human-centered strategies that cultivate curiosity and meaning-making capacities beyond automation. Sketchnoting, thinking maps, and Artful Thinking Routines provide a viable solution for educators who wish to create space for curiosity to flourish.
Ditching worksheets doesn’t mean abandoning structure in the classroom. What it does mean for teachers is reimagining these structures. After all, creativity loves constraints. Structures with intention can become springboards for deep creative thinking. A commitment to ditching the worksheet will not only evoke curiosity and joy in our students, but also reignite teachers’ passion for teaching.
Reflect & Discuss
How might replacing a worksheet with sketchnoting or a thinking map reveal different dimensions of student understanding—especially for students who struggle with traditional assessments?
What draws you to worksheets in your own teaching? What would it take to feel confident ditching them for more open-ended tools?
