Exit tickets from today's slides, kept for the whole term

The bin at the end of the week

For five years I ended most lessons with an exit ticket. Three questions on a slip of paper, written during the lesson while the class worked, answered in the last four minutes, collected at the door. I'd flick through them that evening, get a feel for who'd got it, and plan the next lesson's opener accordingly.

Then, every Friday, I'd put the week's slips in the bin.

I had to. There were a hundred and twenty of them a week, and no system that could keep a slip per student per lesson across a term in any form I could read back. So the most useful information I generated as a teacher lived for about a day and then went in the recycling. I knew it at the time. I just couldn't see what to do about it.

Check: Why did the teacher bin a week's exit tickets every Friday, even knowing they were useful?

What an exit ticket is for

In case the term is new to you, the whole idea in a paragraph.

An exit ticket is a tiny check at the end of a lesson, on the one thing the lesson was for. Not a test; a reading of the room. It replaces "any questions?", which gets silence, with three questions, which get answers from everyone, including the students who never put a hand up. It tells you tonight what you'd otherwise find out at the end of the unit, when it's too late to do anything cheap about it.

Three rules that make them work:

• One idea. Today's. If the lesson was how the heart pumps blood, every question is about that.
• Short. Three questions, four minutes. Longer and it becomes a task; students start to perform rather than answer.
• Used. The results change tomorrow's lesson, visibly, or the class works out within a week that the ticket goes nowhere.

Check: What are the three rules that make an exit ticket work?

Mei's term

Mei teaches science. She'd read something I'd written about exit tickets and said, reasonably, "I don't have time to write three questions per lesson per class, and I'm not going to carry slips around." So this term she tried it a different way, and I watched.

Each lesson's slides were already made. Once the slides were done, they went in, with one line: "three exit-ticket questions on the main idea, one of them a written answer". At lunch she read what came back, changed what needed changing, and approved it. In the last four minutes of the lesson, the class answered on their phones or laptops. Marked as they submitted, with a line under each answer saying why.

And this is the part that was different from my slips: nothing went in the bin. Each student's ticket joined their own history on the class's page, lesson after lesson, for the whole term. By week five, Mei could open any student and see every ticket they'd done, in order, with every attempt.

Check: How were Mei's exit tickets made, and what was different about them from paper slips?

Three questions, not ten

The shape Mei settled on, after a week of too many:

1. One recall question. A choice question on the fact the lesson hinged on. "Which chamber of the heart pumps blood to the lungs?"
2. One application question. A choice question that needs the idea used, not just remembered. "If the valve between these two chambers leaked, what would happen to the flow?" The wrong options are the misconceptions she'd heard in class that day.
3. One written question. "Explain in a sentence why the left side of the heart has a thicker wall." Marked against the expected answer she wrote, scored out of ten, with the reason shown to the student.

Three questions reads the room in four minutes. Ten questions is a quiz, and a quiz at the end of a lesson is a different thing with a different mood.

Check: What are the three question types in Mei's exit ticket, and what does each one do?

Kept: what changes when the tickets don't go in the bin

This is the section I'd have wanted to read five years ago.

The quiet students become visible. A student who never speaks still answers three questions a lesson, and by week four there's a record of twenty-odd tickets with their name on it. Mei found two students who were quietly fine and one who was quietly not, and she'd have guessed the opposite from the room.

Patterns show up across lessons. A student who gets the recall question and misses the application question, lesson after lesson, has a particular kind of gap. On paper slips, that pattern is invisible, because each slip is read once, alone, and binned.

Absence stops being a hole. A student away on Tuesday gets a nudge the next day that the ticket is waiting. They do it at home in four minutes, having looked at the slides. The record stays complete, and Mei doesn't have to remember who was away.

The retakes are there. Some students have another go at a ticket that evening, unprompted. Every attempt is kept, so Mei sees a student who got one of three at 2:55 and three of three at 7:40, and that pair of numbers tells her something the first number alone would have got wrong.

Check: Name three things that became visible once exit tickets were kept rather than binned.

Tomorrow's first slide

Mei's rule for using the results is the one I used with slips, and it's the one that makes the whole thing worth it: the most-missed question becomes tomorrow's opening slide.

If most of the class missed it, she re-teaches, briefly, before anything new. If a few did, the opener is a quick whole-class look and she catches those few in the lesson. If nobody did, she skips the opener and says so: "Everyone got the valve question, so straight on."

The class worked this out within a fortnight. They could see their four minutes changing the next lesson, and the tickets got a bit more careful.

Check: What does Mei do with the most-missed question, and how does that differ when most, a few, or none of the class missed it?

What the term record told her

At the end of term, Mei had something I never had: a per-student record of thirty-odd tickets each, with every attempt, across the whole topic sequence.

Three things she told me about it:

• Three students who "looked fine" weren't. They participated, they did the work, they were pleasant. Their tickets said they'd been missing the application question since week two. She'd have found out at the end-of-unit test, which is to say too late.
• One student had turned a corner in week six, and she could see the week. Recall questions right from the start, application questions wrong until week six, then right. Something had clicked, and the record showed when.
• Parent conversations got shorter and better. Instead of "they're doing fine" or "they need to apply themselves", she could open the record and say "here's the kind of question that's tricky, here's the week it started". Every one of those conversations ended with a specific thing to do.

Check: What did the term's record show Mei that the classroom and the end-of-unit test wouldn't have?

Reading the drafts at lunch

Mei reads every ticket before the class sees it. Two minutes per class. She's a scientist by training and sceptical by temperament, and I asked her what she changes.

• Questions about the slide, not the idea. "What was the title of slide four?" Deleted. It happened in the first week and not much since; a clearer brief fixed most of it.
• A wrong option that's right in a later lesson. She teaches in a sequence, and the draft sometimes reaches ahead. She swaps the option for a misconception she's actually heard.
• The expected answer for the written question. Always shortened to one line in plain words, because that's the standard the marking follows and she wants it to match what she'd accept from a student out loud.
• Nothing, often. Her estimate is that two tickets in three go through untouched. The two minutes are for the third.

Check: What does Mei change in the drafted tickets, and how often does a ticket go through untouched?

If phones are banned, or you'd rather use paper

The idea doesn't need a device. If your school's phone policy rules it out, or you just prefer paper, the kept part is what matters, and you can keep paper if you're disciplined about it.

1. Three questions on a slip, written while planning the lesson, not during it.
2. Collect at the door. Mark that evening, out of three, with the written question marked right, partly or not.
3. One spreadsheet per class: a row per student, a column per lesson, the score and a letter for which question was missed.
4. Tomorrow's first slide is the most-missed question.
5. At the end of term, read each student's row.

That's what I should have done instead of the bin. What you won't get is the explanation under each answer, the retakes at home, the nudge for the absent student, or the record keeping itself. You'll get most of the teaching value, and you'll find out within a month whether you want the rest.

Check: What are the five steps for keeping paper exit tickets across a term?

If you're in Australia

A term here is about ten weeks, which is thirty to forty exit tickets per student per subject: enough to see a corner being turned, and enough that the end-of-term report can lean on a record rather than an impression. If your school's device policy allows phones only for a stated classroom purpose, four minutes of exit ticket at the end of the lesson is the clearest purpose there is, and worth writing down as such. Swap this section for your own country's term structure and device norms; nothing above depends on it.

Check: Roughly how many exit tickets per student does a ten-week term produce for one subject?

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