Using an Exit Ticket to Guide Planning

This post links back to one particular element of my 10-Minute Skill Builders posts, a series of sessions designed to help teachers develop core skills through a series of short training sessions.

In this particular one, I focused on an element of Assessment for Learning that I think is incredibly effective  -not to mention simple and quick – in making lesson planning responsive to what students achieved in the previous lesson.  The idea is that for their plenary, the teacher designs a question or task that tests for the achievement of the learning objective.  Good questions or tasks should be designed so that they test for misconceptions, giving quick and clear information to the teacher about exactly what needs to be covered in the following lesson(s).

I personally would take the use of an exit-ticket at the end of a lesson over pretty much all other Assessment for Learning techniques; I think that when done well they fundamentally demonstrate what good AfL should be about.

Success criteria for a good exit ticket:

1. Designed to test for achievement of the learning objective
2. Helps the teacher to determine misconceptions / issues with student understanding
3. Quick to mark: the teacher should be able to work through an entire class set in under 10 minutes.  I go through mine immediately after the lesson in the space before my next class comes.

The procedure for using an exit ticket, as discussed in the session, is as follows:

1. Teach a lesson
2. Ask students to complete an exit ticket, answering a question / set of questions that clearly tests whether the objective has been achieved
3. Mark the exit ticket after the lesson
4. Design a task for the beginning of the next lesson which responds to the different mistakes made on the exit cards

I attach the session below, which contains an example of a learning objective, exit ticket question and a before and after example of an exit ticket that a student in one of my classes completed.  I hope this comes in handy!

10 Minute Skill Builders 6 – Exit Tickets to Guide Planning

Josh