This week’s bulletin board is brought to you by exit ticket enthusiasm. I’ve scoured the web for the best posts on our favorite formative assessments. Most of these take you through the what, why, how, and when of exit tickets so I’ve highlighted the best parts of them.
Start with the exit ticket
Teach What’s on the Ticket
It seems simple: If you want students to show mastery on the assessment, you have to teach them how to do what’s on the assessment. For example, if you’re assessing students’ ability to describe a character’s motivation using evidence from a story, make sure you teach what motivation means, how to determine it, and how to support it with evidence.
Exit tickets, or “Did the kids learn anything today?”
How did working in small groups help you learn and understand the vocabulary words?
Answers (with comments):
If I am working with friends, I don’t accomplish much; however, if I am working with non-friends I accomplish the work.
Is it really working together if you do the work and everyone copies from you? (No, but the lazy kids all wrote that they liked working in a group.)
I don’t think this was helpful. I felt that we got off task too easily, and one person would just shout out the answer before we got to do it first. (Interesting, the rest of his group liked the competitiveness of yelling out the answer first.)
It helped me hear how other people think of the words and how they remember the words. (Excellent – the sharing of mnemonic devices.)
What did I learn? The next time, I am going to assign groups.
Creative exit tickets
4. Postcards – Have students write a post card to an absent student explaining the key ideas presented in the day’s lesson.
Exit tickets for accountability
They like the routine. They know exactly what to do. They know at the end of the day they’re going to be held accountable. It’s a really quick way for me to assess if students have learned the concept of the day.
—Abby Randall, science teacher
And finally, we have this week’s feel good link. One set of parents made their kids’ dinosaurs come to life for every day one November. They said that “in an age of iPads and Netflix, we don’t want our kids to lose their sense of wonder and imagination.”
Have a great weekend, everyone! I hope it’s wonderful and imaginative!
- Exit Tickets: What They Are and Why You Should Use Them (gradeable.com)
- One Educator’s Case for Exit Tickets (gradeable.com)