Teachers often summarize during their lessons, but students are rarely given an opportunity to do so. This can lead to a disconnect between what the teacher thinks the students learned and what they actually internalized. That’s why many middle school teachers use exit slips for improved learning.
What are exit tickets?
Exit tickets are a great formative assessment used by teachers to measure their students’ understanding of a daily lesson. In addition to giving feedback to teachers, exit tickets also help students reflect on what they have learned and enable them to express what and how they are thinking about the new information.
How to use exit tickets?
At the end of the lesson, present your students with an exit ticket that asks them to explain something that they’ve learned. It can be content specific – what is the square of 7 – or it can be more general – write a question you don’t still have from today’s lesson, for example. Exit tickets can be shared orally – on the way out the door, tell me your favorite character in the novel so far – or on paper or digitally – write the equation for photosynthesis.
What do you do with the feedback from exit slips?
After collecting exit slips from your students, you can use their responses as a formative assessment and count it as a grade. In this way, exit slips can be one of many items to monitor progress and document how and what your students are learning.
Exit slips can also be used to plan for a follow up lesson – what worked or didn’t work? What do you need to reteach or explain differently? Which students might need to work in smaller groups to review? In this way, exit slips can be used to lead to differentiation for future lessons.
