5 Reasons to Use Exit Tickets In the Classroom
We L-O-V-E exit tickets because they are a great formative assessment tool that gives us a way to assess how well our students understand the material they are learning in class. The best part is that we can then use this data for adapting instruction to meet our students' needs the very next day. Exit tickets allow teachers to see where the gaps in knowledge are, what they need to fix, what students have mastered, and what can be enriched in the classroom.
Here are our top five reasons why every teacher should be utilizing exit tickets:
1.Immediate feedback
When you provide a few minutes of class time for students to complete an exit slip, you are also providing yourself with immediate feedback on how well students are understanding the content you are teaching. You will be able to tell where the holes in their learning may be and can quickly update your lesson for the next day to help fill in those gaps. If you teach multiple classes, you can also take the feedback you received from your first class and try to bulk up your teaching in the later classes. After providing those classes with exit tickets, you can see if your strategy worked. (hint: it usually does).
2. Progress monitoring
If you are using evidence based grading in the classroom, exit tickets serve as a great way to monitor a student’s progress on a certain standard or skill. The great thing about using an exit ticket is that you can monitor the same skill over and over in a variety of ways. Using the exit tickets routinely will also help to asses a student’s gap in learning.
3. Critical thinking
Students need multiple opportunities to think critically about their learning. The more they practice this skill, the better they will get at it. An exit ticket can provide your students with time to synthesize, analyze, and evaluate their learning in a way that is meaningful to them.
4. Student engagement
Exit tickets provide every student an opportunity to show their learning, not just for those that consistently raise their hands. Also, as teachers we can learn so much about our instruction when we provide students the chance and time to give us real-time feedback. It helps us to see where their learning gaps may be, but also what we may need to change to help facilitate a deeper engagement from our students.
5. Reflection
Providing students with time to reflect on their learning is probably one of the largest benefits of exit tickets. Often, when a lesson is over we move on to the next concept or unit of study. This is a huge missed opportunity for students and teachers. Providing students time to think about their learning and to reflect on what they learned, what they struggled with, and where they need to go next in their learning is a game changer for student growth. Providing time for students to reflect and asses their learning is the best form of feedback because it holds them accountable for their own learning and it creates genuine opportunities for students to grow in their skills.
If you love the idea of using exit tickets in your class, check out our Instagram inspired exit tickets. We provide you with over 60 exit tickets that are highly engaging and will surely get students thinking and reflecting on your daily lessons. The exit tickets focus on a multitude of skills and levels of learning such as summarizing, questioning, inferring, synthesizing, evaluating, and creating. Each page can be used with a variety of lessons. With over 60 exit tickets, you will never be short of amazing ways to get your students thinking and reflecting about your lessons.
Happy teaching!