How to: Win Every Lesson with Skill Builders and Daily Drills
Have you ever walked by the practice fields at the end of the school day? You might expect to see athletes in the throes of gameplay, but I’m willing to bet you’ll see something else. You’ll find soccer players dribbling delicately through tiny orange cones, track stars lunging and lurching as they stretch out their calves, and tennis players shuffling through the grapevine.
So, what are they doing? Why aren’t they playing? Well, as any former peewee player can tell you, they’re running their drills! Athletes start every practice by isolating core movements and skills, perfecting them over and over, one after another, until they’re ready for game day. It’s rare to find even a JV coach who doesn’t employ this method, but it’s not nearly as popular in classroom teaching. Yet, it’s in the classroom that we need it the most: Skill Builders and Daily Drills can make all the difference in our instruction!
As teachers, we often feel a little guilty when we do the same activity for multiple days; a little sheepish when we create any activity that requires rote repetition. (I have yet to meet a coach who shares this sentiment: lookin’ at you, Coach Wilson, who made us loop the track literally ad nauseam.) But, here’s the truth: it’s not the sheer novelty of our lesson plans that’s driving student learning. Rather, it’s the building of core skills—as students apply them over and over, across a variety of contexts.
And, buildable skills do require an element of repetition to master. Remember learning to add? To read? To write? You did flashcard after flashcard, sounded out word after word, and practiced letter after letter. And just look at you now! Reading this post like the literary genius you are! A little repetition’s not always a bad thing, I’d say.
Even in middle and high school, every content area has a few core skills that need to be built up over time: developing a cohesive argument, crafting a grammatically correct sentence, sequencing accurate problem solving. Sometimes, it’s helpful to practice these skills in isolation before they’re applied in your lesson: to name them, articulate them, and measure them as our students work to improve. To practice dribbling the ball between those little orange cones, as it were…long before the championship game, when the defensive midfielder is headed your way!
Your warm-up is the equivalent of stretching before practice, but your Skill Builders and Daily Drills are the more structured, routine daily exercises that take your students from clumsy execution to practiced finesse. The key with Skill Builders and Daily Drills is to practice a little bit each day: students will be encouraged to see incremental improvement, and you’ll have valuable data about how your class is progressing. (Incredibly helpful for administrator observations, I’ll add.)
There are subtle differences in execution between Skill Builders and Daily Drills, but I like to include both in every lesson, typically right after our Warm-Up, Objective, and Housekeeping segments. Each takes about ten minutes from our block schedule, but the remaining hour is certainly long enough for traditional instruction and guided practice. (You could also alternate: a Skill Builder one day, and a Daily Drill the next.) The two look and feel similar from a student perspective, but have slightly different purposes. Let me explain the distinction:
A great Skill Builder…
Provides time for students to absorb the material and learn independently
Has a format that is comfortable, familiar, and efficient
Allows students to move at their own pace as they process new ideas
Includes a wide variety of examples, preferably with a “set-it-and-forget-it” approach
A great Daily Drill…
Provides a vehicle for formative assessment
Has an answer key and a quantifiable score, so that students can easily measure their progress
Is self-evaluative, rather than requiring teacher scoring and feedback
Has an element of pacing , so that the class finishes the same task at the same time
Covers tailored examples, preferably related to the specific lesson at-hand
In essence, Skill Builders allow students the time and space to learn independently, while Daily Drills offer them specific feedback in real-time. And, these apply to any content area! Pause, for a moment, to consider the core skills in your discipline. Take a look at the examples below:
Buildable Skills…
Math: Basic operations, problem solving, number sense, formulas
English: Thesis statements, vocabulary, general literacy
History: Sequencing, cause-and-effect, basic recall of historical events
Science: Hypotheses, diagramming, vocabulary, data analysis
World Language: Conjugation, vocabulary, speaking practice
Once you have determined the core skills in your subject, you can isolate them to create a Skill Builder or Daily Drill. Here are similar examples, applied in a daily routine:
Skill Builder Examples…
Flashcard Review: Students use digital flashcards to learn vocabulary, practice basic math problems, memorize key dates and names, or master conjugations.
Problem Sets: Students work out sample problems, translate example sentences, or create original sentences using vocab words in context.
Daily Doodles: Students diagram a chemical formula, draw a flowchart of historical cause-and-effect, or create a mind map for one of the novel’s motifs.
Online Learning: Students have ten minutes of time to use Duolingo, work on IXL, or review the class Quizlet.
Daily Drill Examples…
Fast Facts: Students have 5 minutes to complete a set number of practice problems that they then check against an answer key.
Quick Write: Students have 5 minutes to brainstorm a thesis, write a working definition, or propose a hypothesis, which they then compare with a checklist of criteria.
Vocab Check: Students have 5 minutes to define a set vocabulary list or to match terms with definitions, checking their responses when the timer is up.
Daily Diagram: Students have 5 minutes to label the parts of a diagram, using a word bank to identify all necessary parts before comparing their version with the correct visualization.
Typically, creating a Skill Builder requires setting a timer and providing a corpus of examples (that is to say, a large-yet-curated selection). Students have five, ten, or fifteen minutes to work through the examples on their own, but they can also practice them at home. There is no set expectation for their pacing and no set scoring for their work. A Daily Drill, however, defines those metrics: adding a time limit, a checklist of criteria, or an answer key. Skill Builders end with the chime of a timer; Daily Drills end with students’ scoring their work to see if they’ve met the criteria. This way, students have both time to absorb the material (through Skill Builders) and a sense of their level of mastery (through Daily Drills). The key is to use the same format each day: Skill Builders and Daily Drills are meant to be repetitive, so that students can quickly assess their own improvement.
Choose something that is intuitive, easy to access, and easy to plan—preferably, something that is set-it-and-forget-it. For example, for Skill Builders, my classes have a giant Quizlet set for each unit that they work on day after day. We mix up the modes and the games that we play, but the word bank is the same for several weeks. One-and-done, set-it-and-forget-it. Daily Drills are a bit more tailored, but still familiar: for our conjugation checks, I use the same worksheet format each day, but switch up the verbs that I’m using to fit the lesson at hand. Students need no instructions to execute these in class: some days, I simply tap the timer and watch them hop right to work. This is how it should be: they know exactly what to do!
From a planning perspective, Skill Builders and Daily Drills are also a win. Skill Builders might take me 45 minutes of prep time to brainstorm for an entire unit, and Daily Drills take approximately 5 minutes each to design. That’s 165 minutes per quarter, give-or-take. But, together, Skill Builders and Daily Drills represent 20 minutes of class time each lesson, for a whopping 540 minutes in total! Not a bad ROI, I’d say…
The consistency of this daily routine allows me to focus on my direct instruction: instead of planning an hour and a half of unique material on block days, my daily routine has 30 minutes of repeated content (including Skill Builders, Daily Drills, Warm-Ups, and Housekeeping), allowing me to focus my energies on a 60-minute “power hour” of unique activities and instruction.
Now, there might be a nagging voice in the back of your head: isn’t this a bit rote, you ask? Am I just being a lazy teacher? Here’s my challenge: don’t knock it ‘til you try it. Give Skill Builders and Daily Drills a chance, and take an open-minded look at the results. Survey the students, too—I’m all for it! They might find the routine a bit annoying, at first (as teenagers are wont to do), but over time they will be thrilled to see their improvement. Give it a try, and let me know how it went…I have a feeling you’re headed for a winning season!
