Exit Ticket Ideas to Help Students Reflect on Learning
Exit tickets are a great way to encourage students to participate in the learning process and are a great way to provide valuable feedback to the teacher on a lesson.
All grade levels can utilize these exit ticket ideas! Keep reading for exit ticket examples you can start using right away, or click here to see the free exit tickets, lesson hook ideas, differentiation strategies, and more!
Formative Assessment
Exit tickets are a type of formative assessment, so they do not need to go in the gradebook, but they do provide valuable information for the teacher. They're also a great way to teach students to assess their own learning, and provide students with immediate feedback.
Because this is an informal assessment, there is less pressure when students respond.
Exit Tickets & Active Learning
Exit tickets are a great way to get students active in learning. Rather than passively listening to a lecture and moving on to the next lesson, filling out an exit ticket allows students to process the day's lesson content.
There are so many ways to use exit tickets in the classroom, so including exit tickets in your classroom is easy. If you'd like to read more about active learning strategies, check out this blog post.
What to Use for Exit Tickets
There are so many ways to get student responses through an exit ticket. Exit tickets can be physical, digital, or verbal. It's great to vary the way you utilize exit tickets to reach students with different learning styles. You can also modify these exit ticket ideas for in-person or online learning.
Physical Exit Slips
The most common understanding of an exit ticket is physical exit slips.
These work great in a classroom because they let students write their answers and the teacher can collect answers and respond to them when appropriate.
If you're looking for physical exit tickets you can use in your classroom, check out this free option.
Sticky Notes
Sticky notes are a fun way to gather students' answers.
Using a sticky note is fun for kids in general. (I have had so many students ask me for a sticky note so they could draw or do something creative with it.)
Sticky notes provide a small space for writing, which is great for an exit ticket, where you only need a quick answer.
Verbal Exit Ticket
A verbal exit ticket is another option.
Verbal exit tickets are great because student understanding is assessed immediately. The teacher can then gauge understanding and provide immediate feedback.
The nature of a verbal exit ticket also allows for a more relaxed and low-pressure response.
Digital Exit Tickets
For online classrooms, digital exit tickets work well.
Online learning, including google classroom, can use a digital exit ticket to as an informal measure to see if students understand a lesson.
Types of Exit Tickets
There are so many exit ticket ideas that you can use in your classroom. If you figure out what you like, you can use the same exit ticket for most of your lessons.
A good exit ticket doesn't have to be complicated; it just has to get students thinking about the day's lesson and provide feedback to the teacher on student understanding.
Check out these exit ticket prompts that you can start using right away!
Click the image to download free exit tickets, lesson hook ideas, differentiation strategies, and more!
What Was the Main Idea?
One easy exit ticket that you can include in your class is to ask students, "What is the main idea of today's lesson?" This prompts students to synthesize information. This is a great skill in general because it's something students are expected to be able to do with any text. So, having students write down the main idea is good practice.
Having students write the main idea also helps teachers understand whether or not students got the message of the lesson, especially one with more overarching concepts, rather than details you want them to remember.
Click the image to download free exit tickets, lesson hook ideas, differentiation strategies, and more!
What Are the Key Points?
Similar to the main points exit ticket, key points exit tickets require students to reflect on the lesson and come up with a few main points. Again, this helps students summarize the information and figure out what the most important pieces of the lesson are.
This doesn't require any preparation except to have slips of paper or sticky notes available to students, as the prompt is universal.
Click the image to download free exit tickets, lesson hook ideas, differentiation strategies, and more!
One-Sentence Summary
One-sentence summary exit tickets are also a quick check in to make sure students got a good overview of the lesson and were able to pull out the most important pieces. If your students are capable, you might have them write their one-sentence summary without much guidance or any specific requirements, but there are a couple ways to scaffold this.
For a story, you can use the Somebody-Wanted-But-So-Them method of summarization. Students would write a sentence like this: [Somebody] wanted [goal], but [problem] so [solution] then [conclusion].
For nonfiction texts or other lessons, you might ask students to compare & contrast two ideas. A sentence frame for this would be: [Idea 1] and [Idea 2] are similar in that [similarity], however, they are different in that [difference].
Click the image to download free exit tickets, lesson hook ideas, differentiation strategies, and more!
One-Minute Exit Tickets
Another option is the one-minute exit ticket, where students write as many of the important details as they can remember in a minute's time.
Having a timer can create stress for some students, so be aware of this and try to make the time-limit fun without adding pressure to students as they answer.
Click the image to download free exit tickets, lesson hook ideas, differentiation strategies, and more!
Brain Dump
This is a low-stakes version of a one-minute exit ticket.
When doing a brain dump, students can write all of their thoughts an ideas about a lesson without being afraid of getting a low grade. The purpose of this type of exit ticket is for students to get their ideas on paper, which helps them understand the information better and organize it.
With the "brain dump" format, students don't feel pressure to get the "right answer" and can concentrate on getting their ideas flowing instead.
Click the image to download free exit tickets, lesson hook ideas, differentiation strategies, and more!
Application
A great exit slip option to help students relate to their learning is to do an application question, such as "How can you apply what you learned to real life?"
This makes student learning more accessible because they see why they might need to know the content or how it relates to their world.
Multiple Choice
This type of exit ticket probably requires the most preparation. When presenting students with a multiple choice question, you may even print the question on slips of paper, cut them out, and have students read the question and respond to it on that piece of paper.
This is a great way to check in and make sure students understood a math lesson or something with more specific answers.
Another way to do this without so much computer prep is to write the question and answer choices on the white board and have students write their answer (A, B, C, D) on a sticky note or 1/4 sheet of paper to turn in with their names.
Click the image to download free exit tickets, lesson hook ideas, differentiation strategies, and more!
Traffic Light
This is a fun twist on exit tickets and is great for younger students.
Have students color in the red, yellow, or green circles of a stop light to indicate how well they understood the lesson. This does rely on students being able to assess their own learning, but it's also a great way to have students take responsibility for their learning.
Another way to do this if you want to do it more consistently is to give students slips of green, yellow, and red paper and have them hold up the color that corresponds to their answer. This is an alternative to a quick thumbs up/thumbs down check in.
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The Muddiest Point
Part of the reason teachers should utilize exit slips is because it allows them to find gaps in learning so they can reteach more effectively.
"The Muddiest Point" asks students to write down the muddiest point of the lesson or the part of the lesson that made the least sense. Then, teachers can read through student responses and determine what needs to be retaught.
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Then vs Now
When students learn new things, they often correct or add to information they already knew (or thought they knew). One way to help students see this growth is to have them fill out a then vs. now exit ticket.
For this exit ticket, students should write one thing they thought before the lesson and then write something that was new to them or how their thinking was corrected.
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3-2-1 Exit Ticket
The 3-2-1 exit slips require a little bit more writing from students, as they ask for 6 different responses.
First, students are asked for 3 things they learned. This is a great way for them to show what they know.
Next, students list 2 things they found interesting. I like this piece because it helps students think about what the lesson mattered to them and what they can pull from it to share with others.
Finally, students ask a question they still have. These responses are great for identifying gaps in learning for reteaching.
Click the image to download free exit tickets, lesson hook ideas, differentiation strategies, and more!
In My Teacher's Shoes
Another creative exit ticket idea is to have students respond to the prompt, "If you were in the teacher's shoes, what part of the lesson would you spend more time on?"
This is a great way to see what gaps in learning students might have without them feeling like they failed because they didn't understand the content.
Draw Your Response
A great exit ticket idea for younger students is to have students draw their response to a prompt. These prompts might be more specific. For example, "Which character lost its ball?" Students can also add images of other concepts they learned from the lesson.
Depending on the situation, you may want to go around the classroom and have students verbalize what they're drawing so that you can write it for them on their paper or make a mental note of who needs more support with the lesson content.
Verbal Exit Ticket
This is a great idea for a lesson that ends with an independent worksheet. As students stand in line to turn in their work, they tell you one thing that they learned from the lesson. Alternatively, you could ask them a specific question or have them ask you one question about the lesson.
Students receive immediate feedback from you, and you can quickly assess student learning.
Wise Words
A version of a verbal exit ticket is something called "Wise Words". During this activity, students can either write down the most important concept from the lesson that they believe should be shared with others, or they can form small groups and tell the other students what they learned.
Lunch Question
While most exit tickets require students to present the teacher with their response, a lunch question prompts students to think about their learning throughout their break period.
As you dismiss students from a lesson to lunch and recess, challenge them with a question they can discuss during their break.
To encourage participation, you can make the question as funny, interesting, or thought-provoking as possible, or you can provide a reward for students who come back from the break with an answer.
Google Forms
Google forms is a great way to create automatically graded exit slips, which can provide immediate feedback to students. Google forms is free and works well within a google classroom.
You can use google forms to create one of the previous exit ticket ideas mentioned, but creating the multiple choice question or traffic light exit ticket utilizes the automatic grading more than the open-answer questions do.
For the traffic light option, you can easily create one question in your google form and have 3 answers with pictures to show each part of the traffic light.
Conclusion
Exit tickets benefit teachers and students alike! Teachers get an understanding of how much the class has learned, while students internalize teaching more thoroughly as they process it through an exit ticket.
These exit ticket ideas are a great way to make sure your students pay attention, take responsibility for their learning, and also acts as an informal assessment on student acquisition of the learning material.
When students share what they learned today by responding to a prompt, they retain their learning better than they do by listening passively to a lecture.
