A short response that your students would complete before they leave the classroom or zoom room.

Exit tickets allow teachers to see where the gaps in knowledge are, what they need to fix, what students have mastered, and what can be enriched. Exit tickets are not a test but a way to understand students' comprehension of a particular topic. With this information, teachers can adjust instruction and plan how to best meet student needs by modifying and differentiating instruction

Provide students with a range of possible responses and ask them to use the options at the end of assignments or virtual class sessions. One possible way of gauging students' level of understand at the of an assignment could be similar to 5th grade mathematics teacher Kyle Davidson uses with his students (see below).

1. I'm just learning (I need more help).

2. I'm almost there (I need more practice).

3. I own it! (I can work independently).

4. I'm a pro! (I can teach others).

This feedback about where they are helps Mr. Davidson plan for specialized support and his next lessons. Once a week, there is a live session where students are divided up (based on the feedback they gave). He manually populates the breakout rooms with those students who ranked themselves as a 2 or 3 so they can support one another.

The students who feel like they can teach others (4) are generally smaller in number so he distributes them carefully in breakout rooms that might need some additional expertise. He chooses tasks for these breakout rooms that are culled from the week's assignments that proved to be more challenging. They have around 10 minutes or so to work on a parallel problem together.

In the meantime, the teacher is meeting with the small group of students who asked for more help (gave a 1). He mentions, "It's a chance for me to reteach and find out where their barriers lie. If I need more time with individual students, I schedule an additional session just for them." He calls this portion Mastery Monday so everyone always knows when to expect this routine.

He mentions the whole thing takes about 15 minutes but gives him time to know where everyone is at. "It's a great warm-up for all of us. When we return to the main room, it becomes our first whole-class discussion and I ask 'What are you learning about yourself as a learner?' because I want to reinforce the value of persistence and collaborative problem solving in mathematics - just like the real world."

Ideas:

• Create a post/slide/picture/chat/sentence/etc. with your biggest takeaway from today’s lesson.

• In one sentence, summarize what you learned during today’s lesson.

• Create a visual/sentence/poem/etc. that captures one question you have at the end of today’s lesson.

• In one sentence, share what you would like to learn more about during our next lesson.

Resources:

• Tools: Padlet (ideas and how-to here), Google Forms (or Google Classroom's Quiz), JamBoard, FlipGrid, Seesaw or Google Classroom's private comments or question feature

• Exit Slips from Jennifer Findley (learn here how to use it or read the full blog post here. Then, make your very own copy of them HERE).

• Using Exit Slips with 4th and 5th graders by Jennifer Findley

• Click here for a tip jar to use at the end of an assignment. Go to the three dots at the top and click "Make a copy" and then click the blue "share" button and share it with your class to edit or make it editable to anyone with the link to send out that way. Might be helpful to go over how to use a jamboard if they never have before. This could also be done as a Google Slideshow if you and your students are more comfortable with that format.

Want to learn more about exit tickets or see on in action? Click here.

When a student is teaching someone else after they have learned it. They are teaching it back to you, another classmate, a family member, a stuffed animal, pet, etc. It can be done in person, over video, or in writing or a blog.

When students can teach someone something (whether it is through a screen, to a family member, or to the teacher or class) they prove that they know the learning deeply and the process helps them to internalize their learning and gain a clearer understanding of what is important and how to communicate it.

Students assessment themselves and/or each other where where they are at. This can also work collectively in a way that students are assessing themselves as part of a group or partners. Effective self and peer assessment requires: exemplars clearly demonstrating what is being learned, clear and specific success criteria on manageable chunks of learning, opportunities for students to identify success and a place for improvement, and opportunities for students to make improvements independently.

Self and peer assessment is about revision and improvement. It enables students to independently assess their own and other students’ progress with confidence rather than always relying on teacher judgment. When students self and peer assess, they are actively involved in the learning process and their independence and motivation is improved. Students who can look at their work, and judge the degree by which it reflects explicitly stated goals or criteria, can assess the quality of their work and revise it accordingly, they show more growth, responsibility, and academic success.

Learning Intention (which are also called teaching points, objectives, learning goals, learning targets, or purpose statements) is a statement of what students are expected to learn from the lesson. Learning intentions are based on the standard, but are chunked into learning bites. Learning intentions to be effective are easily understood by students and are shared at both the beginning and the end of lessons so that students know what they are supposed to be learning and focusing on and then can reflect on whether they have learned it or not.

The Learning Intention/Teaching Point is what the students will be learning and the Success Criteria is how they will know they have learned it or how they will show they have learned it. Great learning intentions and success criteria are in student friendly language and are clear to the teacher, students, and anyone else who might be in the room or listening. Students should be able to answer what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how they will know they have learned it.

It is incredibly important for students to know what they are learning about so they can focus on it and know what is expected from them. This not only provides a clear path for the students but also allows them to determine if they have indeed learned what they were supposed to at the end of the lesson. We start and end strong lessons with the learning intention and success criteria to reinforce the learning.

• It focuses on one or two learning objectives. A long history of scholarship argues that feedback, even on large assignments, should generally focus only on a manageable number of topics, no more than a few.

• Students do the heavy lifting. Teachers often fall into the trap of correcting work for students and doing more reflection on student work than they require the students to do. Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle call this Helicopter Teaching, and while it generally comes from a place of wanting to help, it often holds students back for two reasons: First, when students don’t have to work for an answer, they are less likely to remember it. Second, the time it takes to correct student work and solve problems for the students severely limits how much feedback the teacher can give them. For Flash Feedback to work, students must be the primary ones finding answers, patterns, and approaches, as the teacher plays the role of the guide standing well off to the side.

• It utilizes systems and technology. Feedback often has a lot of redundancies that can be mitigated with better systems or by using technology, and even little efficiencies add up. For me, each 15 second increase in efficiency saves me 40 minutes when taken on the scale of all of my students!

• There is a spillover plan and time allotted for special cases. There will inevitably be times when a student’s specific needs won’t fit within the system and structure being used by the teacher. This is why having a clearly defined spillover plan/time will help to make sure that the needs of one or two individuals don’t derail the plan for the rest of the class.

Instead of circling and correcting commas found in every paper, you can use Targeted Response. Targeted Response is where the teacher focuses an assignment and its feedback solely on 1 to 2 targeted learning goals. When it comes to commas, my students write a very short one-page paper about anything they want in any genre. It is called the Comma Paper, and its only criteria (and the only thing I give feedback to) is that they must include at least four correctly used examples of each type of comma we studied in class.

To speed my assessment of and response to these papers, I have students turn them in on Google Classroom. That enables me to use the Find Function (Command-F) to highlight all of the commas in the piece, so I can quickly scan for comma issues. It also allows me to pre-populate two comments in the comment bank (if you don’t know how to do this, here is a quick tutorial). One is a short congratulatory note for students who had no comma errors. The other is a message where I tell students the number of comma errors and let them know that to get credit for the assignment, they must find the errors and fix them during the class time provided.

By keeping the scope of the paper and feedback focused and using the technology tools available, I can give specific, individual, and meaningful feedback in less than a minute per student, and the best part is that the deep focus on commas leads to more student growth in one short paper than a year of circling and correcting commas ever did!

Conferencing is one of the most celebrated pedagogical tools, and there is good reason for that. It is a rare one-on-one opportunity to offer individualized instruction and feedback, fix misconceptions, build relationships, and give students the opportunity to be heard by a caring adult. Like written feedback though, the logistics of conferences can be daunting in most classes. My classes meet for 210 minutes each week and average 32 students. This means doing a five minute conference with each student takes over 75 percent of the class time that week.

While larger conferences are sometimes worth this time investment for me, I can only do so many if I want to cover everything else I need to do. Enter the Micro-Conference, which is a conference that is done in a fraction of the time (generally 1 to 2 minutes) by being focused and carefully structured.

One of my favorites is one I do around paraphrasing, which is another deeply important skill that students tend to struggle with. Here’s how it works:

1. Students write a rough draft of a paper with paraphrasing, like a research paper, and bring it to class.

2. As a whole class, we read and discuss mentor texts with strong paraphrasing.

3. Students take out their own drafts, pick a page to work with, and then highlight each moment of paraphrasing they see.

4. They then rate their paraphrasing in their paper from 1 to 10, based on the mentor text we read, and write at least four sentences justifying their rating.

5. Once students have rated and reflected on their work, they call me over and we quickly conference. I generally start conferences by asking students to share their ratings and what they noticed when comparing their work to the example. We then use those thoughts to plan an actionable path forward together. My role in this is mainly that of the gadfly—asking questions and helping the student to orient in the right direction—and while I try to keep the conferences to no more than a minute, most generally wrap up naturally in that time without feeling rushed.

Like the Targeted Response, everything about these conferences is designed to maximize time efficiency. The students have already laid the groundwork and highlighted the paraphrased sections, allowing us to jump right in at a high level. Further, by focusing just on paraphrasing, a minute is not too short to go deep, answer questions, and figure out meaningful action steps forward for the student.

Wise Interventions is a practice that came out of Stanford and the University of Virginia, among others, and the idea behind it is that while shifting negative student mindsets, beliefs, and behaviors is often painstakingly slow, in the right circumstances it can also happen incredibly quickly. The key to these moments of rapid positive change is that if teachers can find the exact moments that fuel and perpetuate negative student beliefs/mindsets/behaviors and disrupt them, sometimes it can open students up to better alternatives in surprisingly little time.

Probably the most famous example of this was a study of Massachusetts middle schools that found that students did twice as much revision on an essay when they each received a sticky note on the top of their essays that read “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them,” versus those who got a sticky note that read “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.”

The researchers theorized that the reason for why one sticky note—the product of no more than a few seconds work—would have such a large effect on student mindsets and behavior was that many students in the study might have felt the teachers didn’t believe in them. Those narratives were disrupted by a note coming just at the moment they were preparing for teacher disappointment once again via the teacher comments, which in turn cleared the way for those students to put in more work.

I use a number of Wise Interventions in my classes, but my favorite with feedback is one called “I’m so sorry about the rain.” It comes from Daniel Coyle’s book The Culture Code, and the basic premise is that a study out of Harvard found that people were 422% more likely to let a stranger borrow their phone if the stranger prefaced asking for the phone by saying “I’m so sorry about the rain.” The reason this rather banal comment about the weather led to a striking shift in behavior was likely that it was enough to signal a relationship, which changes nearly everything about how a brain responds to a request.

I have found that little personal things that take only a few seconds to write—like quickly referencing something a student said in class or an aspiration the student shared at some point—can often have the same effect on students, especially those who are wary of writing, and shift the attention and care they give to feedback on that paper and beyond.