… 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.

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.