Welcome to the All Star Planning Podcast. My name is Kelsey, and this is the place where I talk all things teacher lesson plans. Today, we are talking about exit tickets or exit assessments, bell ringers. I like to call them baby quizzes. I hate these, I hate them! Maybe more than I hate Do Nows. Possibly because I was never as a student, given these types of assessments on the regular.
The whole point of an exit ticket or a bell ringer or whatever you may call it, is that you are looking to find out what the kids learned that particular day.
Why I Hate Exit Tickets
There is so much that can go wrong during your lesson, that you have an idea of what the kids are going to learn,and it winds up going down a completely different path. And maybe you’re teaching wasn’t what you thought it was going to be. The kids’ understanding wasn’t what you thought it was going to be. There have been so many days where I have just face planted. And what I wanted to teach was not actually what happened that day, So that’s part of the reason I hate exit tickets. But also I hate the name, exit tickets. While I’m here, just bashing them.
I really think that the term exit tickets sounds really terrible. To me, it just sounds like you can’t leave my classroom until you get the question, right? It just, it sounds very intimidating to me. I’m just not here for that. So I instead call them baby quizzes. They are small. Usually they’re printed on tiny paper. Hence the name baby. And they are a little quiz of your knowledge, right?
Grading an Exit Ticket
I think these baby quizzes are very difficult to grade. Exit tickets are very difficult to grade and that’s kind of where the issue lies. So, in being a high school teacher. I don’t know how many other people have this experience, but, some students choose not to take things as seriously as they should. Unless it is going to be a graded assignment.
At minimum, there will always be at least one kid in your room that asks “is this graded?” And will determine the amount of effort that they put in based on whether or not it’s graded. And how many points it’s worth. I was one of those kids. That’s how I know that this exists. I took a class in college where the homework was only 5%, so I literally just never did it.
5% of my grade wasn’t gonna make a big difference. So I think these things are very difficult to grade simply because you are testing, whether the kids learned something. Like 11 minutes ago. And you’re not testing any kind of retention. You’re really just testing or assessing for understanding. Which I don’t think one lesson is enough information to determine whether a kid understands something. Maybe that’s just me. I don’t know. These things honestly, make no sense to me. I do them because I’m supposed to not because they make sense.
Um, I teach something, right? Some kids will get it immediately. Most kids I think are only going to understand it after they do some classwork with it. After they go home and do homework with it. After they sit on it for a few days, after they learn things that come next in the sequence. If I’m assessing the third lesson in my unit, maybe it doesn’t really click until I get to lesson five.
I have so many issues with exit tickets. But I just, I hate the concept of testing or assessing things that kids learned 10 minutes ago. It’s really like a recitation thing to me.
These things are super difficult to grade, right? It is hard to determine whether a kid actually knows this information, or if they’re just remembering something that was said in class 15 or 20 minutes ago. I don’t really think that’s fair. It’s almost kind of like reviewing for a test. Twelve seconds before administering a test.
You have to question whether or not the kids actually understand it, or if they are just remembering the things from the review session. It’s kind of like cramming for a test, right? And you think, “oh my goodness, if I had just flipped the page in my notes, I would have known the answer to this question” because you were reviewing for the test two and a half seconds before the test started. You.
Everyone has one of those students that will flip through their notes, like crazy, and will keep the notes out on the desk until the absolute last minute. And they will actually be reading the book as they’re closing it and putting it down into their book bag. Everybody has seen or had at least one of those students. Does that kid actually understand the content or are they just repeating what they just read in their notes three seconds before the test? Right? So this is my idea with the exit tickets or the baby quizzes is that I don’t actually know if this kid knows this information or if they are just able to recite something back to me, right.
How to Ask an Exit Ticket Question
So when it comes to these exit tickets, your questions have to be very direct, but also thought provoking and give you a bigger picture as to whether or not there is understanding. And this is where it gets difficult because you need to be a decent question asker in order to get good information. The way I explain it to my students is if I asked you, what is your favorite food? And you said spaghetti. But I really wanted to know what your favorite dessert was, I asked the wrong question because spaghetti is not a dessert. So when it comes to these exit tickets, we actually have to be super mindful about how we ask these questions and how we are actually getting information on the actual level of understanding versus reciting things that were just taught to them.
This is very hard to do. It’s going to depend very firmly on your content and your style of teaching and the style of notes that you give out and what your classwork was. Unfortunately, I can’t just give you a formula, like “do this” and then everything will be fine.
I actually like to do, instead of writing out a brand new question is usually look at my classwork and go to – towards the end of the questions. Right? Cause usually when I write things, um, the stuff in the beginning is like the easy stuff. The middle is the medium stuff, and then towards the end is usually the hard stuff.
What I like to do is ask the kids. Let’s go over the work I want everybody’s answer to number nine. And then we go over specifically number nine and I’ll use that as my assessment piece because it’s, based on what they learned, it’s part of the classwork, so it was very easy for me to integrate into the grading system.
And then it’s not something separate that I need to necessarily plan or something that I need to print something, that needs to be copied, something that needs to be chopped up because we all know I’m about little papers in the guillotine trimmer and interactive notebooks and all of those things. I really prefer to just extract a particular question from the classwork. And we talk about it and we go over it and I ask the kids, “How do you feel about it?” It’s not always for me, uh, whether they got it right or got it wrong. I, a lot of the time, more so care about how the kids feel about the work, because if they’re finding it too difficult, too stressful, they’re not making proper connections. That is where I need to come in and help them.
I always like to refer my kids to Google Classroom because I will go and watch hours of YouTube videos trying to figure out other ways to teach my content. Sometimes you just need to hear something in a different way in order for it to click. So I will find on YouTube, somebody who teaches the same thing, but a different way from me. So I will have the kids go watch a video. I will have the kids attempt to teach each other because I think that that’s not only helpful to the kid explaining, but also to the kid who’s learning, just to hear it in a different way.
So that is something that I love to do after we go over the question. Because. I think it just gives us, uh, a better well-rounded answer as to whether the kid is understanding the content. Because that’s the whole point of the baby quiz or the exit ticket is to find out if they’re actually understanding what you just taught.
But based on the type of question and the format and whether or not it’s actually graded, you are going to get a big mishmash of answers. But if you can incorporate your exit question into your classwork, if you give a classwork grade, it becomes far easier for you to be able to make sure the kids are taking the work seriously.
And then you can, um, not have to worry about adding in an extra element to your planning, which if we’re adding in unit plans, the goal would be to subtract someplace else. And I would say subtract your exit tickets. Don’t not do them, just do them differently so that it’s actually less work.
Integrate Exit Tickets into Classwork
The next thing is that I don’t always collect work, but if I were to collect work in an effort of exit assessment, I would maybe grade questions, three, six, and nine and leave it at that. I don’t think that every single question needs to be graded. And I think that depending on your formatting of your questions, how they’re being asked, whether it’s multiple choice, free response, an essay question, there’s lots of different types, um, we can kind of extract and figure out what kids are learning without having to grade everything. So that is another option. But if you’re not down with grading, which usually I’m not and if you have a pretty good culture of self assessment in your classroom, that’s my tip next week, you can get the kids to tell you.
I will ask my kids “who got question nine, right? Raise your hand. Who got it right but they don’t understand how or why they got it right? Raise your hand. Who got it wrong, but now based on the explanation knows why they got it wrong?” And then last, “who got it wrong and doesn’t know why they got it wrong?”
And because I have such a good culture in my classroom of learning over grades my kids are honest with me.
There’s nothing that I could say other than you need to just love your students. You don’t have to tell them that you love them, but show them that you love them. You don’t have to say the L word. I know there’s a lot of people out there who don’t like saying “love” at school or with their students. I don’t care. I’m not one of those people. I love my students, every single one of them.
But there are plenty of ways that you can show that you love your students. We’ll get into that in next week’s episode. But when you show them that you care about them as people, you care about their learning more so than you care about what their report card says, then you will have kids who are honest with you.
So your exit assessment can be as quick as “please raise your hand. If you got this question, right. Raise your hand. If you got this question wrong.” And, especially if it’s a hard question and you introduce it as, this is the hardest question on the worksheet. Or this is the one that makes you think the most outside the box.
The kids who get it wrong, aren’t gonna feel bad that they got it wrong because it’s quote “the toughest question on the worksheet.” Or it made them think really, really hard. When you introduce it like that, when kids get it wrong. They don’t feel like, bad about it, you know? If you said, “this is the easiest question on the worksheet, raise your hand if you got it wrong.”
Kids are gonna feel embarrassed if they got it wrong and they’re not going to want to raise their hand. When it comes to your assessments, you want to make sure that you’re framing them in such a way that kids feel comfortable being honest with their answers.
What if I don’t get to the Exit Ticket?
And lastly, I would just like to say that, if you don’t get to it in your class. There’s absolutely no harm in using your homework assignment the next day, coming in as your assessment. I don’t think that that should be the norm or the regular. But there are days where things just go entirely wrong. Or I had kids get stuck in an elevator one time and it sucked to 15 minutes out of my class. Right.
So, when things like that happen, your lesson doesn’t go the way that you want it to go because you’ve planned for every single minute. You didn’t anticipate four kids getting stuck in the elevator and all of them on Snapchat being clowns about it, being silly. So, thank goodness, they wound up safe. I mean, that was a concern of mine, but, my entire lesson was derailed. So the, the next day I used my homework assignment as my exit assessment, as opposed to what I had originally planned.
So I think that when things go wrong, you can do that. Or you could use your Do Now the following day to kind of determine how much they learned. I don’t think that’s the best way to do it. Simply because the exit assessment is supposed to help you anticipate mistakes that the kids are going to have tomorrow. More questions that you can answer. Things that you can iron out before they get ugly. And that is why you want to do it during the meat of your lesson, as opposed to the following day. But things happen. So that is a backup plan.
All right. That’s all I have for you in terms of exit tickets. I hope that I have given you some valuable information here. Aside from the fact that I simply hate them.
Again, I do them because they are important. It helps the teacher to navigate where the class is headed, what they’re understanding, what they need help with. And they are super valuable, but they are also super annoying.
Figure out how to get the kids to self assess them, and integrate them into your classwork when you can so that you don’t have to plan for something additional. And also there is a level of seriousness to your exit assessment.
So I will see you next week in our next episode. If you haven’t already, please make sure to sign up for the All Star Planning Masterclass. That is where I will explain to you the five pieces of the All Star Planning method and how all of those pieces fit together. I would love for you to take that masterclass it’s free. You can find it at plan.kelseyreavy.com. You can also find links to it all over my website, which is Kelseyreavy.com. And I will talk to you next week, bye.
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