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Jennifer Gonzalez recently wrote an extensive blog post about worksheets and packets on her Cult of Pedagogy site. She writes, "there are plenty of instructionally rich things you can do with a worksheet: A graphic organizer is a wonderful tool for research, pre-writing, and notetaking. An excerpt from a primary source can be printed on a worksheet for close study and annotation. Worksheets can be used for analyzing data (like this collection from Maria Andersen), as scaffolds for notetaking, as tools for reflection, or as formative assessments. They can also be used as recording tools alongside more active experiences: data sheets for labs, planning sheets for group projects, and so on.

"In my experience, when people criticize worksheets, they are referring to a specific type of worksheet, what I will call a busysheet, the kind where students are either doing work that’s fairly low-level recall stuff–filling in blanks with words, choosing from multiple-choice questions, labeling things–or work that has no educational value at all, like word searches, word scrambles, or coloring stuff in cases where coloring adds no extra layer of understanding."

Read her excellent blog post for a critical take on "busysheets" and how to make learning meaningful for students: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/busysheets/

Elisabeth of Spanish Mama has responded with a reflective and helpful blog post about worksheets specifically in language classrooms. Read her post at http://spanishmama.com/spanish-worksheets/