At LEAD, it was a requirement that every lesson finish with an Exit Ticket ...
… but there was open disagreement about that.
I would love to render some of the awkward dialogue in meetings where I, the experienced 44-year-old, but nevertheless first-year charter-school teacher, and my 22-year-old fresh-out-of-college well-versed-in-Doug-Thompson partner met with the 32-year-old charter-school-veteran supervisor about our lesson-planning parameters. But for now I’ll boil the issue of good Exit Ticket design down to the following:
Yes, finishing the lesson with an assessment that is …
1) formative (i.e. is not coercive, does not impact the students’ grades)
2) doesn’t take too long
3) summarizes for the students what was learned, and
4) yields actionable data,
5) and doing so every single lesson
… is an excellent idea — one of the best that has been introduced into contemporary conversations about pedagogy — but they are neither necessary nor sufficient. That is to say ...
No, you are not failing the students if you are not able to satisfy all of the five Exit Ticket criteria above.
No, satisfying the five Exit Ticket criteria above does not mean that you have composed the perfect course plan.
And you should not allow even a well-designed schedule of Exit Tickets to constrain other decisions that you might make.
And so to clarify, let me take each of the above five criteria in turn.
ONE — Keeping the Exit Ticket formative. This is the easiest criterion to satisfy. But you have to communicate through these Exit Tickets that you sincerely want to know what the students are learning. If the students begin to suspect that you don’t read the Exit Tickets, then the Exit Tickets are not effective.
TWO — Not letting Exit Tickets take too long. This criterion was the hardest one for me to satisfy at LEAD. If you look carefully online at the running discussions about what makes a good Exit Ticket, you begin to see that teachers’ Exit Ticket styles diverge. For some, Exit Tickets are like dialogue journals. For others, they are like standardized tests. I am not going to prescribe one approach. But I will say is this, WHATEVER form your Exit Ticket takes, it much be SUBSERVIENT to the rest of what you are doing. It is a means not an end.
THREE — Sumarizing through the Exit Tickets what was learned. There is an important paradox here … (A) This is a good ideal to strive towards, and (B) the best teachers must necessessarily fail to reach it. So (A) strive to compose Exit Tickets that encapsulate the lesson for the students, and (B) strive to deliver lessons that could never be summarized in a mere Exit Ticket.
FOUR — Capturing data with Exit Tickets. This is hard to do, but it was something that in my experience at LEAD definitely distinguished the veteran from the rookie teachers. And here, you need to think about the number of kids that you are teaching. Volumes and volumes of data that you do not have time to systematize is in effect not actionable data.
FIVE — Doing an Exit Ticket every lesson. Basically, for those of you that teach the kids once per week, this is the only thing that makes sense. In situations where you see the kids every day, some flexible thinking is in order. Again, Exit Tickets are counter productive if the students percieve that you do not take the Exit Tickets seriously.
Exit Tickets must be cultivated as a meaningful element of your instruction or they should not be deployed at all.
