Exit Ticket

An Exit Ticket is both a student participation strategy and a formative assessment technique.

The teacher ends the lesson with a short question or sequence of questions that reflects the core of your objective. The teacher then collects this (sometimes literally at the door) as students leave (thus the term "Exit Ticket").

Discussion:

Adapted from Lemov, Doug (2015-01-07). Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College (p. 191). Wiley.

Use of Exit Tickets will not only establish a productive expectation about daily completed work for students but also ensure that you always end the lesson with an objective check for understanding that you can take with you, analyze, and even bring back and reteach the next day if necessary.

After reviewing the results of an Exit Ticket, you hope to know:

What percentage of your students correctly answered a key question measuring the objective?

What patterns do you detect?

What mistake did those who got it wrong make?

Why did they make that mistake?

You can start to reflect on whether your “gut” sense of how well the lesson went was correct, and why. You'll know how to refine the next lesson, and you'll no longer be flying blind. You'll know how effective your lesson was, as measured by how well they learned it, not how well you thought you taught it.

Characteristics of Effective Exit Tickets:

Not all Exit Tickets are created equal. Some of the more effective ones tend to share some characteristics in common, including the following: They're quick: one to three questions. It's not a unit quiz. You want to get a good idea of how your students did on the core part of your objective with about ten minutes of analysis afterward. They're designed to yield quick data. Think about asking each question (or part of a question) to focus on one key part of the objective.

Review Data Efficiently: One of the key themes teachers report about the effective use of Exit Tickets is the importance of reviewing the data. Teachers advised looking at the data quickly and using a standard, low-transaction-cost way of processing to make it easy to take action. Leanne Riordan of Baltimore suggests looking at the Exit Tickets as soon as you can, right after the lesson if possible, and sorting them into three piles: Yes, Some, and No, based on the responses. After looking for reasons that students missed a concept entirely or grasped it partially, make quick notes right on the Exit Ticket. You can then use these piles to differentiate small groups the next day or to create a Do Now for the whole class if needed.

As an added tip, keep the No pile on the top as a reminder to check in with those students more frequently the next day.

Heather Snodgrass of Nashville advised: “[ I] write the exit ticket first, before planning out any other parts of the lesson. This helps me focus in on the key points that are essential to conveying the most important content, and occasionally helps me refine the objective so I'm homing in on a manageable and appropriately rigorous skill.” She added, “I also like having a consistent routine for students who frequently finish their Exit Tickets very quickly. One I've used for math is having students write their own problems about the skill we've learned that day. Students also like this if they get an opportunity to solve each other's problems.”

CAUTION: Exit Tickets can be useful for assessing certain types of knowledge. The more complex knowledge and understanding make quick student responses and quick reviews of the data difficult.