Exit Tickets

My first few years of teaching, I did not use any type of Exit Ticket. The result was never-ending anxiety about ending class exactly on time. End too early and there was potential for the kids to get restless or herd themselves to the door. End too late and kids didn't have time to effectively fill out their planners, pack up, etc. The Exit Ticket solved these problems and many more. It was one of the first daily procedures I implemented that significantly streamlined my classroom and instruction.

What is an Exit Ticket?

An Exit Ticket is a short response or task students complete at the end of class. It is often called an Exit Ticket because kids use it as their ticket to leave the classroom.

Benefits of Exit Tickets

There are so many benefits to Exit Tickets. They can do any of the following:
- Reinforce the most important thing learned that day or class period.
- Give you the ability to implement a quick, informal assessment about what was learned during that lesson. Responses can help you adjust instruction for the following day and/or be reviewed with students at the beginning of the next class.
- Allow some flexibility at the very end of class. (Exit Ticket questions can easily be modified to be shorter/longer as needed.)
- Keep students occupied with a task so you can complete end of class activities such as signing planners, resetting technology, and preparing for transition time.

Designing your Exit Tickets:

Typically, I design my Exit Tickets questions based on my overall objective for the day. However, that doesn't mean that Exit Tickets have to be strictly informational. Exit tickets can also ask kids their opinions about what was covered or help them apply AVID or Leader in Me skills to their life.

Here are a few sample Exit Tickets I used last year in 9th Grade Language Arts:
- Write a sentence about what you did over the weekend that includes the correct use of a semicolon.
- Write one discussion question (opinion question) about The Raven that you want to talk about next time. (During the next class, the best questions were integrated into a Socratic Seminar.)
- What are two strategies you will use to study for the vocabulary quiz taking place next class period?
- In your own words, explain the difference between stage and set as they relate to plays.
- What questions or comments do you have about the project you received today? You must write either one question or one comment.
- List as many steps as you can think of that you will need to complete in order to finish your essay by the due date.

These questions or prompts are projected on the Apply TV and students fill out a Feedback Form with their personal response. There is a tray next to the door where students place the Feedback Forms as they exit.

Exit Tickets in Elementary
Exit tickets can work at any grade level. Here is a great video that shows how one teacher uses Exit Tickets in elementary math:


Other Thoughts

There is another reason why I use Exit Tickets that goes beyond just curriculum and instruction. Exit Tickets give every kid the opportunity to interact with you on a given day or during a particular class period. It is each student's direct line of communication to the teacher.

My Exit Ticket form gives a space for the required response, but it also includes an optional section that gives kids the opportunity to add any questions or comments. I've seen kids do all sorts of things with this space: draw pictures, write jokes, compliment the lesson, or tell me something about themselves. Others leave it blank, which is fine too.

Back when I taught in Michigan, I had an 11th grade student who started to come to 1st hour late every day. After a few weeks of this, I made a few sarcastic comments to him about his tardiness. These comments weren't meant to be offensive, but in retrospect it was not the best way to handle the situation. A few days after the comments, he wrote something like this in the optional area of the Exit Ticket: I'm very sorry that I've been coming in late. My family just got kicked out of our home and we now homeless. 

Well, that made me feel like a world-class jerk. It all suddenly made sense. We are always taught never to make assumptions about why kids are behaving a certain way and this exemplified why these assumptions can be problematic.

My team teacher and I immediately reached out to the student and his family. We were able to connect them to some agencies for help. As the year continued, the situation had its ups and downs. While we were able to sign the family up for the school's Giving Tree and other opportunities, we were not able to fully get the family members the help they needed. However, things did improve. In this case, the Exit Ticket opened a larger conversation with this student and we ultimately developed a very close relationship. I might have eventually found out about this kid's situation without the Exit Ticket, but then again I might never have known.

Many kids are carrying around things that they would like to tell us, but they don't have the words or confidence to do that. The Exit Ticket provides them with an alternative. Over the years, this example has always been the one that resonated most, but there have been countless times when a student told me something on an Exit Ticket that allowed me to get to know or help him/her in ways I never would have been able to without the Exit Ticket.

Download

If you want to download my version of an Exit Ticket, the link is here: Feedback Form PDF. I'm a fan of making the Exit Ticket (which I call a Feedback Form) more generic as opposed to having specific questions or problems on them. That way, I can print a bunch of them and use them for different questions. Some instructional programs like Engage New York have pre-made Exit Tickets with the actual math problems directly on them. You can also do a digital Exit Ticket using Google Classroom or other technology.

Do you do something unique with Exit Tickets? How do you use them in your classroom? Feel free to leave an idea in the comments below.