The Power of an Exit Ticket.

Have you ever been told that exit tickets are useless because by then it’s too late–meaning, you’ve given an assessment at the end of class, what changes can you make now, class is over? Well, there is some truth to that, but every teacher knows that at the end of a lesson, we want to know how well our students understood the content and who mastered the learning target. Exit tickets are plenty useful for figuring that out! And if you haven’t been routinely giving exit tickets or exit slips, you should be because they are a critical formative assessment and if you are collecting and utilizing the data, it can provide you with important information for content that needs to be retaught or how to regroup your students for the next lesson.

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𝙵𝙾𝚁 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙶𝙾𝙻𝙳⭐️ Showcasing a few Exit Tickets from my morning class. One way I have famously kept my students motivated is by offering extra credit opportunities. These gold stars rack up by the end of the marking period. I had one student earn 24 extra credit points by the end of the quarter. It helped him so much because he didn’t perform as well as he wanted too on his major assessment. He still passed my class⭐️. I teach 11th and 12th grade and these gold stars go hard. My students get really upset if they are a small error away from getting a star. I love the responses after giving back Exit Tickets 🙈🤩. I only offer gold stars on Exit Tickets so that my students take them very serious. . Today I did something different. I gave an Exit Ticket when students walked in. Some felt challenged as we had just learned this lesson only yesterday. Afterwards, I had them peer grade. Then we went over some of the independent practice problems. I did some small group conferencing and then ended the class with another Exit Ticket. I was impressed with student growth💡Try out the gold stars! And buy my Exit Ticket Slips in my Tpt 🤓 Link in bio🍏 #exitticket

A post shared by LaShay Mamuya (@allthingsteachrm321) on Jan 4, 2019 at 8:35am PST

One of the ways I utilize exit tickets is by simply posting a problem that aligns directly to the learning target for the lesson on the board and instruct students to show their work on a small exit ticket slip. I created these fun, student friendly, mini exit tickets to switch up the look and also to boost student engagement. It turns out that the students love using them and they don’t feel like a “test” or “quiz”. So the students take the exit tickets serious. Definitely give it a try if you are interested!

Once students all have one of these slips, I instruct them to complete the problem on the board. There is typically only one problem and when there are multiple they are not differentiated so everyone is working on the same problem. I will say however, lately I have been changing things up a bit and providing several problems and assigning them to specific groups to better reach students’ academic needs by differentiation. But in general, students are working out the problem on the slip and then quickly giving themselves a self-assessment about the particular problem which is really the learning target.

Students have three options for checking off how they feel about their mastery of the learning target. Either, “I Got It!”, “Sort of”, or “I Have No Idea!” The language is friendly so even if a student knows that they don’t understand the content, they won’t feel “stupid” or “ignorant”. It’s also helpful to see how confident students feel about their understanding. You may have a student who feels like they are exceeding standards and are having no problems at all. And then you see that they are forgetting to distribute a negative when multiplying polynomials, for example. In addition, you may realize that a student lacks confidence but is academically strong. Knowing these characteristics can be great teaching moments, often making it your job to also remind students to feel good about their work. 

After students have completed the exit tickets, you can begin collecting data right away. You can even group the exit tickets into piles based on self-assessments, accuracy, misconceptions, etc. The next lesson should be geared towards addressing some of the issues you saw across exit slips and regrouping students. 

I created several versions of these slips:

Definitely give exit tickets another try in your classroom and see how it goes! You can find these slips in my TpT Store.