Why You Should Be Using Exit Tickets in Your Classroom

What are Exit Tickets?

An exit ticket is when you have the students respond to a prompt, answer a question, solve a problem, some activity that you have students do and pass in to be able to leave at the end of class.

An exit ticket is a great way to get an on the spot assessment of how the students are doing, or for the students to reflect on their learning.

Exit Tickets for Assessment

Exit tickets are a great way to get a sense of how your class is doing.  What was the objective of your lesson?  If you wanted to make sure that the students knew how to do a specific skill by the end of your lesson, give a question relating to that skill as your exit ticket.  This will allow you to see who gets it and who doesn’t.

Doing this is a great way to help you plan your instruction for the next day.  If you know what the kids still are struggling with, you can design your lesson to that skill.

Don’t you hate when you give a quiz, and there are so many lost kids?  But these students never asked questions or came for extra help, so you’re shocked that they don’t get it!  That has happened to all of us!

If you use exit tickets as a quick assessment at the end of your lesson, it allows you to see how they’re doing throughout the process.

Exit Tickets for Preview

If you are starting a new topic the next day, you can use exit tickets to see what the students already know.  Ask them a question about their opinion on a topic.  Assign them to explain a concept in their own words, and you will see where your class is already.  This can help you plan how you are going to introduce a new topic.  Why reteach something if your class already understands it?

Exit Tickets for Reflection

Giving students the time to reflect on what they have learned allows them to synthesize the information and relate it to what they have already learned.  At the end of your class, give your students five minutes to fill out an exit ticket summarizing what they have learned.  This helps them cement the information into their memory and will help with retention of the information.  Also, this allows you to see how well your student understood the lesson.  And if they took from the lesson what you wanted them to.

Final Thoughts

Exit tickets should not be graded.  There needs to be an expectation that the students will complete the assignments, so maybe grade them on completion, but not content.  Letting the students know that they are not being graded on the accuracy of their exit ticket takes some of the stress away.  This allows the students to fill out the exit ticket honestly, without the anxiety of receiving a bad grade.

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