When you are in the moment, running your lesson, you want to be fully present -- reading each kid's face and posture, listening carefully for what's being communicated back to you. This is not the space to be parsing some treatise on the the subtleties of classroom management. What you need are pithy DOs and DON’Ts. DO use them as a tool for structuring your lessons better. A lesson-planning technique that I have evolved for planning a lesson is to compose a, perhaps hypothetical, summary task that I want the students to be able to complete by the end of the lesson. If the task can be composed in such a way that it works well as an Exit Ticket, then all the better, but at least have that task in mind. My experience is that foreign teachers in Japan tend to think of some fun activity first and then compose the summary task or formulte it as a “SWBAT” (Students Will Be Able To), after the fact. The ideal summary task/Exit Ticket would strike you as something that would be impossible for the students before taking your lesson and easy for the students afterwards. Then hold that summary task in mind throughout the lesson and let it guide all of your in-the-moment decisions: “is this decsion that I am considering going to move the students closer to the summary task?" DONT not do something simply because it’s not justified in terms of the Exit Ticket. Think of progress towards the Exit Ticket as analogous to function of the vamp or the chorus in a jazz performance. The musicians are supposed to create excitement by improvizing in ways that stray sometimes far away from that initial chord progression and melody, but the point is always to bring it back. Jazz musicians that don’t know how to do that are hacks. It’s a delicate balance of home-not-home-home-again. So with teachers. DO create space, if not for an Exit Ticket, at least some sort of summary task in every lesson — even if the summary task is not something that you can collect and document (an Exit Ticket). Avoid the habit of assuming, just because you “covered” something, that that is enough. Whatever else student-centered-ness might mean, at the very least, we should all be able to agree that it means seeking tangible proof of what the kids are getting out of what you are doing. DON’T scrap a given activity that is going well simply because you “need to leave time for the Exit Ticket.” Be ready to scrap the Exit Ticket if you need to inorder to create maximal space for the learning that is going on. The learning is the goal, not the Exit Ticket per se. This is a vital distinction, and something that in America — with its current transient state of test-obsession — is lost on many young teachers.