How do you close the lesson in such a way so as to confirm what has been learned? This is what Exit Tickets are about.

The priciple is make sure that in every lesson you collect actionable information from each student concerning what he or she is getting out of your class. And as this video alludes to, improvements in technology have vastly expanded the options for doing this.

Exit Tickets are a good concept, but I want to express some concerns that spring from how I have seen the concept applied.

DON’T LET YOUR EXIT TICKET CONSTRAIN WHAT YOU TEACH. Look again at the video. This is definitely some footage of some on-the-ball teachers teaching some very lucky kids, but does this thought cross your mind: “‘argument includes logos and persuasion includes logos, pathos, and ethos.’ That doesn’t constitute what I want my kids to learn about rhetoric.” It’s a way of encapsulating things, but I’m not even sure the these teachers would assert that [Argument]=> [Logos] and [Persuasion] => [Logos] + [Pathos] + [Ethos] is either a necessary or sufficient concept in understanding rhetoric. It’s a construct for looking at the difference between Arguing and Persuading. It’s not the same thing as a = b and b = c so a = c in understaning algebra. Don’t reduce your students to the question of whether or not they can answer multiple choice questions. Gather data about your kids through all media available to you, but always be expansive, and if you expand beyond what can be captured on a quiz sheet, that’s fine.

DON’T CONFUSE THE FOUR KINDS OF ASSESSMENT — Diagnostic, Standardized, Graduated, and Coercive. I have written about this elsewhere. These four kinds of assessment have their place, but you are hurting your kids if you presume to do two at the same time. I see this mistake made all the time by otherwise great teachers. If students are taking an assessment for a grade, then that is a Coercive Assessment. It needs to reward desired student behavior, and having it serve any other purpose is unfair to the student. Imagine going to your family doctor and thinking that the answers that you gave him or her would have some bearing upon what grade you might get in school. Would that help or hurt your doctor’s ability to diagnos your illness?

THINK FLEXIBLY ABOUT WHAT UNEXPECTED RESULTS MEAN. A large number of students getting everything wrong on your Exit Ticket should be as alarming to you as everybody getting a perfect score. In both cases, the data suggest that you have missed the mark. Your instruction has landed outside of the zone of proximal development. OR it could mean that you have designed your exit ticket the wrong way. OR it could mean that you have have failed to motivate the students to take the content seriously.

NOBODY LEARNS ANYTHING IMPORTANT IN 50 MINUTES. This was one of my frustrations in workingin the data-driven context that, admittedly, I only dabbled in this past fall. (This is not an indictment of LEAD — a team of highly skilled highly principled educators commited to work that the vast majority shrink from. It’s an indictment of the social circumstances that induce stresses and political pressures to which we were forced to adapt our curriculum.) Every single one of our lessons were required to end with an Exit Ticket. I liked to think (and my bosses did not like me thinking this) that most of the substance of what I had to offer these students would be delivered over the course of an arc that would stretch from the beginning of the year to the end — that yes, I had little interesting tidbits to convey, like “Man is the dream of a shadow,” (or perhaps that [Argument]=> [Logos] and [Persuasion] => [Logos] + [Pathos] + [Ethos]) but that there were layers and layers beyond those near-term, swallow-and-regurgitate jellybeans — themes that would recur and recur from encounter to encounter and draw into a meaningful whole by the end of the year.

And maybe that kind of thinking is too high-minded for the realities of teaching the underprivilaged kids that we were teaching … heh ...

But it’s very hard to get Exit Tickets to capture any but the most near-at-hand aspects of what you want your students to learn and so in using Exit Tickets, you need to let that near-sightedness not distract you from the larger arc of what you are trying to accomplish because, as I have discussed elsewhere, that larger narrative arc of your class is precisely what makes today’s fifty minutes meaningful.