It’s taking me a long time to get around to completing what I was going to say about Exit Tickets in the Japanese TESOL context. In this fourth part of my discussion, I am going to focus on what happens after you have collected the Exit Ticket. 50% of what you are looking for in examining the Exit Tickets is whether or not this was a good Exit Ticket. This gets back to the question of whether this is going to be a Diagnostic or Coercive Assessment. A lot of the literature about Exit Tickets stipulates that Exit Tickets are supposed to be Formative (or what I like to call Diagnostic) assessments. But when I look into what that means in terms of execution, I find that this is not at all the case. People have begun to throw around the word “Formative” to the point where it simply means “good.” “This is an excellent formative assessment, so we want to make sure that we include it in the grade.” NOOOOOOOOOO! As I will say in every opportunity where I get to, if the assessment is designed both to generate a score that is then going to be communicated to the student, as well as to yield some kind of reliable measure of where the student is, then it is a badly designed assessment. So we are being honest with ourselves about the nature of the assessment. If it is a Diagnostic Assessment, you need to judge whether the Exit Ticket tests what you taught. Can you tell that the students were challenged by your Exit Ticket in a way that forced them synthesized what they had practiced in class today? If it is a Coercive Assessment, you need to judge whether it was designed in such a way that the kind of engagement with the material that you are looking for is the kind that is being rewarded by scoring well on this Exit Ticket. And in both cases, do the students' responses suggest to you that experience the Exit Ticket was a convenient summary of what happened in class today? 40% of what you are looking for in examining the Exit Tickets is whether or not what you are doing is having the impact that you expect. To the extent that you have decided that this is a good Exit Ticket, you need to look for gaps in what you think you are teaching and what the results of the Exit Ticket show what is actually being learned. Especially in the TESOL context, it is VERY hard to tell what of what you are doing is actually effective. When I observe classes taught by foreigners in Japan, I do see homework collected, but I rarely see work gathered from the students that relates directly to what happened today in class. Given that a lot of times, a whole week is going to pass before the teacher sees those kids again, a teacher needs to be able to go on more than what he or she observed strolling around the room. The Exit Ticket is a person-by-person survey. 10% of what you are looking for is data. I think that I’m not alone in saying that I am tired of hearing the word “data” and “data-driven.” The “Teach Like a Champion” people specify that the primary purpose of an Exit Ticket is to gather data. That’s only a healthy attitude if all of your Exit Tickets are well-designed. — which they won’t be if this is the first time that you are trying Exit Tickets. So go easy on yourself. By doing an Exit Ticket for every class, you give yourself room to experiment. Not every Exit Ticket has to be successful. If there is no useful data in the Exit Tickets that you have collected, that in itself is useful information that will help you when you turn around and plan what Exit Tickets you are going to give the kids for the next class.