Exit tickets are an integral part of responsive teaching that are used to inform teacher practice. When using exit tickets, typically, an exit ticket task is created by a teacher, they are completed by students before leaving the classroom, the data are collected, aggregated, and analysed. Critically, though, the power in exit tickets is about what happens next, how the insights gain inform next steps in the classroom.

Exit tickets are not intended to be summative in nature. Nor are they a high-stakes test or assessment. Rather, they are a short informal assessments, surveys, or tasks, usually 2 – 5 questions in length that students complete before they leave the classroom. They usually take no longer than a few minutes. Typically, they are used by teachers as a form of formative assessment to check the level of student understanding of the lessons that has just been completed. They can be used to collect feedback from students about many aspects of their learning experiences. Exit tickets can be used by teachers as a pre-assessment to learn about their classes’ knowledge of an upcoming topic. Teachers can also use entrance tickets at the start of class for a similar purpose.

The purpose of using an exit ticket is to collect feedback from students. The real power of an exit ticket though is to equip a teacher with timely insights about their class so they can adjust their teaching & learning. Exit tickets also allow a teacher to understand the impact of their teaching and gain insights into their students and their experience in the classroom.

As Hattie, Fisher and Frey (2017) have said “Gathering real-time data about good decisions about where students are in the learning process is critical to making decisions about the next lessons or next teaching move”.

Exit tickets are perfectly suited to providing this data.

• They can be used quickly and easily check understanding of a topic, skill or concept being learned.
• The information gain from exit tickets can support planning subsequent lessons. For example, you might find that many of your students did not quite grasp a concept and then plan to review the material again.
• They can encourage students to reflect on their learning which can help to build their meta-cognitive skills.
• They are a good way to record evidence of student development over time.
• They can reduce anxiety about answering questions in class and remove the fear of failure.
• They ensure feedback is provide by all students.
• If constructed well, they require student to apply their knowledge which can help to deepen learning.
• They can challenge students to synthesize knowledge and express their understanding in their own words.

Given that a primary purpose of exit tickets is to collect feedback for teachers to inform their practice it stands to reason that the data they yield will only be comparable to the effort spent designing them. This means that it is important to design exit tickets that will yield useful, actionable information about your class. It is also critical to ensure that they are easily understood by students and appropriately short (i.e. they should not take more than 2 – 5 minutes to complete).

Some recommendations for exit tickets include:

• Exit tickets should be low stakes (i.e. not graded).
• Two to five questions are fine, students should be able to complete finish in a few minutes.
• Embed exit tickets through your teaching units and not just the end of a unit or semester.
• Exit tickets can enable you to really engage your students while still assessing their understanding to your lesson so be creative in the types of questions you ask students.