7  Reasons to use exit tickets in the classroom

Exit tickets are a simple and easy way to informally assess your students’ learning of the lesson you just taught. They’re given at the end of a lesson and are usually no more than 2-5 questions in length. Today I’ll share 7 reasons to use exit tickets in the classroom with your students.

An exit ticket should be directly connected to the lesson’s objective. When used correctly, exit tickets help teachers quickly and effectively evaluate their students understanding of the skills taught in the lesson.

An exit ticket’s job is to inform your instruction and the next steps you’ll want to take with your students.

Why Should I Use Exit Tickets?

There are so many wonderful benefits of using exit tickets! Here are 7 ways to use exit tickets effectively to formatively assess your elementary students!

1.Exit Tickets Help Organize Students Into Small Groups:

 Small group instruction allows you to meet the individual needs of students much faster than teaching whole group. I almost always divide completed exit tickets into three categories and then label the categories 3, 2, and 1.

• Group 3 : being those who’ve mastered the skill or concept.
• Group 2 : being those students who have partial understanding. (usually just missing a small piece in whatever process or skill in the lesson)
• Group 1: are students who do not understand the skill at all and need a total reteach of the topic.

2. Exit Tickets Are A Great Way to Check for Understanding

Having students explain a concept on their exit ticket is a great way to quickly see who gets it and who does not. For example, image you teach a lesson on part, part, whole and then ask students to use words to explain how to find the missing part.

After looking through the completed exit slips, you can easily see if majority of my students understand the concept enough to explain it to someone else. If so, you know they’ve mastered the skill. If not, you now know who you need to spend extra time revisiting this skill with.

3. Use Exit Tickets to Guide Your Next Lesson: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used exit tickets to modify my lessons! What I thought students may need from a lesson was proven wrong sometimes after looking over their exit tickets.

Or perhaps I have planned to teach three days of telling time to the half hour. I give an exit ticket after the first day and notice all my students are able to complete it with no difficulty. This observation allows me to move on to the next lesson and save valuable teaching time.

4. Exit Tickets Give You Immediate Feedback: When you use exit tickets, you’re given immediate feedback on what your students understand from the lesson you just taught. This can be especially helpful when teaching a unit that spans over several days. It is much easier to quickly correct or reteach a single strategy (such as regrouping tens to make ones) rather than waiting until the end of the subtraction unit and reteaching the entire process.

5. Exit Tickets Help With Progress Monitoring: I love using exit tickets to keep track of students’ progress when teaching a new skill. Data from exit tickets can be used to keep track of students’ progress over the school year.

Parent- Teacher conferences are also a great time to pull out students’ exit tickets to show their growth over the course of the year.

6. Exit Tickets Allow Students to Reflect: Exit tickets are one additional exercise for students to show what they know before the lesson is over. As they complete an exit ticket, your students might be surprised to find they don’t understand the content as much as they thought.

I love to use open ended exit tickets like the one above! They are a great way to give students the opportunity to ask questions they may be too shy to as in front of the class.

7. Use Exit Tickets to Hold Students Accountable : When exit tickets are frequently used in your classroom, students will come to expect them. When students expect to have to complete an exit ticket at the end of the lesson, they are more likely to pay attention during the lesson. This means exit tickets improve your student engagement and every teacher wants that!

Want to grab this set of ready- to-use exit ticket templates? Click HERE to check out my Exit Tickets for Any Subject in my TPT store. I like to have several class sets of these templates printed, so that I can easily grab them to use at the end of a lesson. These exit tickets save so much time and your students will love using them!

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