A Place for Drill and Practice

Drill and practice... how do you feel when you read these words?  Do you cringe? Do you, along with many educators these days, consider these "bad words" and bad form?

I'm sure we can all remember pages of drill and practice math sheets assigned to us as elementary students.... endless flash cards... addition, subtraction, multiplication, division... it was how were were taught.  I don't know about you, but somehow I survived elementary math and managed to get more than one college degree.  Our teachers were well-meaning and they did what they knew to do.  But when you know better, you do better, right? An administrator walking into an elementary classroom these days would likely frown upon seeing students completing drill & practice type pages, expecting instead to see hands-on activities to develop a strong sense of numbers and conceptual understanding of operations.  That's great and certainly the expected goal.  But... does drill & practice have a place in the modern classroom? I think yes.

The problem with drill & practice is not the use of the strategy itself, but in the timing.  Pages of addition & subtraction math facts have no place in a Kindergarten classroom. Those students should be developing number sense, modeling addition and subtraction with objects to develop an understanding of the operation, and should be fluently using strategies to actively solve addition and subtraction within 10 (not memorize the answers and regurgitate them). Flash cards or math fact worksheets won't accomplish that learning in this case.

But in second grade? After the concepts of addition and subtraction have been modeled and practiced for two years and the number sense is in place after two years of working in and with number quantities? Heck yes! Now it is time to become automatic with facts.

Enter drill & practice. CCSS 2.OA.2 calls for students to, by the end of second grade, "know from memory all sums of two one-digit numbers." Drill & practice pages are, in my opinion, totally appropriate for students at this point in the game. The same applies to multiplication facts. 3.OA.1 builds the foundation for understanding multiplication the operation, but once that understanding is established, 3.OA.7 requires by the end of grade 3 that students, "know from memory all products of two one-digit numbers." In other words, multiplication facts.  A third grade teacher introducing multiplication by drilling facts would be not be using best practices in instruction.  But a third grade teacher who has established the conceptual understanding of multiplication with and in her students would be well within bounds using drill & practice sheets to accomplish automaticity.  Note: research doesn't necessarily support timed drills. That's an added pressure that just isn't necessary. Use the drill to see if they know the facts, and to practice answering problems quickly.  Don't time 'em, though.

Skills can be practiced in this way, as well.  Not just facts and sight words. I've coached both cheerleading and dance team, and once my girls learned the proper form when completing a skill the next step was always to drill the correct form until it became part of their muscle memory.  Incorrect practice is BAD, but once a skill is learned, drilling the skill repeatedly leads to automaticity.  Be it a toe touch, double turn, hip-hop stall (Google it), or long division....repeated practice leads to automaticity with a skill. It becomes a natural part of a student's skill set.

So what say you? Are you a fan of drill and practice?