Exit tickets – Foolish Wand-Waving

Confession: I hate exit tickets.

The theory behind them is solid, but in practice, they are largely incompatible with my teaching style, for two reasons:

I am the reigning queen of ADHD time blindness. I barely notice the bell signaling the end of class, and you think I’m going to remember to stop two or three minutes early so the kids can complete an exit ticket? Oh, you sweet, summer child.
One of the biggest strengths of my teaching style is its flexibility. If we’re playing a game, or I’m in the middle of explaining something to a student who asked a last-minute question, or the kids are deeply invested in a class discussion, it would be silly to interrupt that to do something less engaging just so I can check a box on my lesson plan. Good teaching is about knowing when to switch activities and when to say, “Meh. This is better than what I came up with for today. Let’s just roll with it.”

That said, consultants and instructional coaches LOVE exit tickets and will extol their virtues with evangelical zeal at every opportunity. Rather than waste time arguing with fangirls, I simply include a line on every lesson plan that says, “Closer: Exit ticket (5 min.)” and keep a supply of four or five different types and styles of exit tickets on hand to whip out on those days when my executive functioning decides to report for duty. I spent part of one weekend prepping these in bulk so I’d have them available for instant use, which is much easier than trying to remember to prep a kajillion little slips of paper every week.

One of my favorites took the better end of an hour to prep, but it’s reusable, memorable, visually interesting, and involves metacognition, which is another fashionable buzzword. If you want to make your own, here’s what you do:

Open a Google Doc, select a 75-point or larger font, and type enough sunglasses emojis to fill a page. (To save time, fill one line and then copy and paste as many times as necessary.)
Repeat with the “meh” and poop emojis.
Print two single-sided copies of the document, laminate it, and cut out the emojis.
Stick a piece of magnetic tape on the back of each emoji and store them in baggies or small containers.

The next time you have a minute or two left at the end of class, get out your emojis and tell the kids that their exit ticket is to choose the one that best matches their current understanding of the lesson and stick it on the board.

Consultants LOVE this, because it hits six buzzwords at once: It’s an exit ticket that serves as a formative assessment by using metacognition as part of the learning cycle in a way that boosts engagement through relevance. (By “relevance,” I obviously mean “scatological humor,” which is EXTREMELY relevant to kids. They love that 💩.)

A few years ago, “exit tickets” were all the rage. Not a workshop, conference, or mandatory professional development session went by without a consultant breaking out forms, sticky notes, or giant Post-It pads and demanding that attendees write down something they’d learned before they were allowed to leave.

These well-intentioned assignments were largely useless, because the consultants invariably waited until the last minute to announce that they would be required. If I’m attending a mandatory activity that is scheduled to end at noon, there’s likely to be a long line for lunch, and you wait until 11:59 a.m. to tell me I have to fill out an exit ticket before I can leave, I’m probably not going to give your last-minute assignment a whole lot of thought.

Unfortunately, exit tickets were so popular at conferences and training sessions that administrators picked up on them and began demanding that teachers use them.

The first time I did this, it worked exactly as well as you’d expect. Kids, as it turns out, have even less patience with last-minute busywork than professional educators do, and they were even less inclined to make any real effort to complete the assignment, so I added exit tickets to the list of party tricks I’d ignore most of the time but break out on days when the brass was visiting and I needed to put on a good dog-and-pony show.

Still, when the brass did visit, I needed the kids to give the illusion that they were all in for exit tickets. One of the fastest ways to get students on board with an activity is to let them think they’re being terribly subversive by doing it — so instead of handing out sticky notes or preprinted forms, I handed out dry-erase markers and told the kids to write their exit tickets directly on their smooth-topped desks.

We were doing an assignment over connotation and denotation, so five minutes before the end of class, I asked the kids to clear their desks and write a definition for the word “connotation” in their own words.

They were all in. Why?

First, I was asking them to do the assignment on my time, not theirs. Second, and more importantly: Writing on paper is work. Writing on a desk is vandalism. How often do you get carte blanche to vandalize school property?

Bonus: If you teach multiple sections of the same subject, this hour’s exit ticket can serve as next hour’s anticipatory set.

Emily

Category: Exit tickets

Chapter 75: Emoji Exit Ticket

Chapter 40: Vandalism