The school year is well under way. Teachers are teaching. Students are learning. Inevitably, the grading is beginning to pile up. It happens to the best of teachers. Unfortunately for students, the learning opportunity tied to a specific assignment has already passed if they didn’t receive timely feedback.
Taking Student Work for a Ride
Early in my teaching career, I was constantly pursuing an easier and faster way to stay on top of grading student work. Even with all of my best intentions, I admit, I frequently took student work for a ride in my car. I would cart student work home with the intention of grading it that night. I had personal and family responsibilities that were important, and by the time I dealt with those, I was ready to drop into bed, often past midnight.
Back to school, the work went the next morning, still not graded.
I’ll get it done over the weekend.
I carted the work home again on Friday, but now I had more to grade. Back it went Monday morning, ungraded. This cycle created countless hours of stress and frustration, not only for me, but for my students.
I knew my approach was neither efficient for me nor effective for my students. It was years before I finally figured out I had to change my approach to make grading student work more manageable.
One Strategy That Makes Grading Student Work Easier
The reality is, for most teachers, there is not enough time in the course of a school day to grade student work. There is too much going on. Teachers spend their evenings and weekends lesson planning and grading student work in the hopes of trying to keep up, let alone get ahead. A teacher’s day does not end at 4:00pm, but rather goes well into the evening on many, if not most, days.
Essays and projects will always take longer to grade because they are more complex projects. The daily work, however, can be handled more efficiently and effectively by using a simple strategy.
Exit Tickets provide a quick and accurate way to find out what students actually know, understand, or are able to do. The beauty of Exit Tickets is that you can use them in any subject area, almost all grade levels, and in countless different ways.
Exit Tickets will not solve everything. But if you incorporate this strategy regularly into your lesson planning, you will find that you have more time to grade the longer, more complex student assignments (writing assignments, projects, etc.) without losing traction on the daily student work.
Exit tickets are quick diagnostic assessments completed by students at the end of class and handed to the teacher on the way out the door, thus the name Exit Ticket. If you haven’t tried using Exit Tickets with your students, you are missing out on a quick and easy, effective strategy for keeping your finger on the pulse of your classroom instruction and student learning. If you already use Exit Tickets, make sure they measure up to the list below.
Oftentimes, Exit Tickets may be used as a quick way to get another grade in the grade book, but with intention, you can glean a lot of information about your students and about the effectiveness of your instruction. Make these little slips of paper work hard for you.
Ask yourself first, what kind of information am I trying to gather? Is it to gather general information about what is clear and unclear to students about the overall lesson, or is it to gather specific information about what students understand, know, and are able to do related to the day’s learning goal. Often this depends on how familiar a concept is to the students.
Just make sure, your Exit Tickets are doing what they are supposed to be doing.
10 Elements for Effective and Efficient Exit Tickets
Exit Tickets . . .
- Align to a standard.
- Reflect the day’s learning goals.
- Focus on ONE idea, concept, or skill from the current day’s lesson.
- Intend to gather specific information, whether open-ended, such as What questions do you have about today’s lesson? or Name the most important idea from today’s lesson., or specific, such as Name 3 causes of the Civil War or What is the first step in solving this word problem?
- Take 2-5 minutes for students to complete, and only 5 minutes for teachers to review and grade. (Use 3×5 index cards.)
- Require students to demonstrate their level of understanding or application of content.
- Reduce anxiety by asking students to provide information in a bite-sized chunk immediately after they have learned it.
- Inform students of what they know and don’t know.
- Assess student knowledge or understanding formatively (not formally). Note: If recording the grade, use low point value (5-10 points) in proportion to your overall grades, and do not include it as a summative assessment.
- Diagnose areas for clarification and re-teaching. Use the data to give timely feedback to students and adjust your instruction.
Ideas for Exit Tickets
For ideas about what to ask students on an Exit Ticket, you can use strategies listed in the ‘Apply,’ ‘Reflect,’ and ‘Summarize’ sections of my blog post Dramatically Increase Student Learning by Using 5 D.A.R.T.S.
Once you review a class set of Exit Tickets, you can do a variety of things based on the information you gather from your students.
You can . . .
• Clarify a misunderstanding
• Re-teach a concept
• Pull students to the side for small group instruction
• Allow a group to work independently and move forward with the content
• Choose a different teaching strategy for specific content
• Decide if students are ready to move on to the next concept or skill
• Have students work in small groups to discuss their ideas from the exit ticket
Plan ahead and intentionally design effective Exit Tickets that provide you with good information about how the students are learning, and how you need to adjust your instruction. You just might find that you are getting better information more frequently, and spending less time grading the daily work.
How do you use Exit Tickets in the classroom? Leave a comment below.