Exit Tickets Strategies and Tools

Directions and Instructional Use

If you’re wanting to learn more about exit tickets strategies and tools, you’ve come to the right place! An exit ticket, “ticket-to-leave,” or “bell-ringer” is a method of capturing student learning, inspiring reflection, and targeting skills for future lessons.

An exit ticket does not have to be fancy, but it should be purposeful. It should aim to assess what has been taught during a lesson or gather information and insight that can be used for the next day’s lesson.

For example, if you’ve taught a lesson on a story, what answer will students be able to provide that will help you know that they’ve learned what you intended? In other words, how will you know they’ve met your learning objective or target? Alternatively, what predictions, statements, or questions will they provide that can help you deepen their learning during the next school day?

Why Use Exit Tickets?

Exit tickets allow teachers to…

• document student learning
• increase student accountability
• use a formative assessment to design future lessons or engage students further

Step-by-Step Implementation

1. Reflect on your learning objective and design the question (or task) for your exit ticket.
2. Determine how much time students should spend on the exit ticket.
3. Identify how you’d like to share the exit ticket. Printed? Digitally? Sticky note? Index card? Remember, an exit ticket should be planned, but if you have a few minutes left in the class and you want to capture some insight, use the resources available to you!
4. Collect and reflect! Use student responses to determine whether students have a superficial or meaningful takeaway from the lesson. Do you need to follow-up with students? Who? Why?

Creating an Effective Exit Ticket

Here are some important tips:

• Make sure your exit ticket questions are purposeful. Use Bloom’s Taxonomy question stems to decide what level of learning you want to assess. Do you want to capture student recall or assess their ability to apply what they know?
• Allow for time. Reflect on your students’ abilities. How much time will yield a purposeful response? How will you redirect students who race through a task? Will you have a bonus question? Multiple questions?
• Think ahead: What answers do you expect to receive? How will you identify mastery? What will you do with the results?
• Exit tickets are an excellent way to foster metacognition. This is when students think about how they think and reflect meaningfully on their learning.
• Consider design! Leave enough space for students to write, draw, and share. Don’t forget to modify and offer options for students. There are many ways to demonstrate learning.

Can Exit Tickets Be Used for “Formative Assessment?”

Yes! Exit tickets can be used for formative assessment. In fact, a worthy exit ticket will prioritize the opportunity to share feedback. Sharing feedback with students, rather than grades, upholds the value and safety of reflecting on one’s learning with authenticity. If students are preoccupied with getting an answer correct because they fear how an exit ticket will be scored, it will devalue the intent of using the exit ticket as a formative assessment.

However, this is not to say that a teacher should not use data to track the depth and accuracy of student responses. Using this data to craft feedback in order to redirect a student’s thinking will be more meaningful than simply supplying a grade on the exit ticket.

Teachers can return individual exit tickets and/ or share whole-class reflections (ie. “I left a comment for you to read.” or “Most of you said something like…Some people said…”). Sharing feedback will sustain one-to-one dialogue between you and your students and foster accountability. By highlighting the results of the feedback, a teacher can showcase and emphasize its value in the learning experience.