How to Completely Transform Your Teaching with Exit Tickets

Whether they’re completed on a piece of paper, a tablet, or a whiteboard, exit tickets are a powerful tool to use in your classroom.

How to transform your teaching with exit tickets - Young Teacher Love by Kristine Nannini

What are Exit Tickets?

Exit tickets are formative assessments that provide information about your students’ learning and understanding of a topic faster than any other tool in the classroom. They provide you with a snapshot of what your students need from you. When used correctly, exit tickets can completely transform your teaching.

How to transform your teaching with exit tickets - Young Teacher Love by Kristine Nannini

Exit tickets are not a formal assessment. Instead, they are an informal quick check that assesses how well a student understands the material they are learning throughout a unit. A well-designed exit ticket can show if  a student has a surface level or deep understanding of the material. They help teachers pinpoint any misconceptions and allow teachers to make any necessary adjustments to their teaching and planning.

Exit tickets are a type of formative assessment. What is the difference between a formative and summative assessment?

How to transform your teaching with exit tickets - Young Teacher Love by Kristine Nannini

The goal of a formative assessment is to monitor student learning. Formative assessments provide quick feedback to teachers so that they can improve or modify their instruction to meet their students’ needs.

Formative assessments can help students identify their specific strengths and weaknesses on a particular topic. For example, when working on adding decimals, a formative assessment may show that the student can properly add multi-digit numbers, but that they struggle with place value and lining up the decimal point in the correct place.

With this information, the teacher can now address that students’ particular needs.

For teachers, formative assessments help them to modify and differentiate their instruction based on their students’ needs. These quick checks help teachers recognize where students are struggling so they can address the problems immediately.

Summative assessments, on the other hand, evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit (think post-assessments). Teachers compare students’ summative assessments to a specific standard or benchmark to show a level of mastery.

FREE! Chart showing the difference between formative and summative assessments - Young Teacher Love by Kristine Nannini

Click HERE to grab this chart for FREE!

Why use them?

5 Reasons Why You Need to Use Exit Tickets in Your Classroom - Young Teacher Love by Kristine Nannini

Below are my top 5 reasons why you NEED to be using exit tickets in your classroom.

  1. Immediate Reflection: Exit tickets help students immediately reflect on what they have learned.
  2. Student Focus: Exit tickets encourage students to pay attention and focus on the lesson.
  3. Get More From Your Lesson: Exit tickets are quicker than homework or other assignments and will be completed on the spot. If a student is practicing a concept incorrectly or is frustrated, you can catch it at that moment.
  4. Immediate Feedback: Exit tickets provide teachers with immediate feedback on how well students have understood a topic or lesson.
  5. Quickly Modify Instruction: Exit tickets help teachers monitor or modify their instruction. You can modify your instruction and pull small groups right at that moment for re-teaching.

 How do I use them?

Exit tickets can be used at any time. You can use them with your students before your lesson, during your lesson, or after your lesson.

How to transform your teaching with exit tickets - Young Teacher Love by Kristine Nannini

It’s important to remember that their purpose, again, is to see what your students know so that you can modify your teaching accordingly.

To implement exit tickets:

  1. First determine the topic or standard that you want students to think about or show their understanding of. You can see on the exit tickets I have created that I highlight this topic or standard with a learning goal that is written in student language.

2. Provide each student with an exit ticket. (If you don’t have a resource like this available to you, I have created Differentiated Exit Tickets that you can see HERE. These exit tickets are 100% EDITABLE. You can change the language to match your standards).

3. Review the learning goal. You can go over the learning goal aloud with your students, or give them a second to read it themselves.

4. Give students the opportunity to complete the exit ticket. Feel free to walk the room, looking over students’ shoulders in order to mentally note student intervention, re-teaching, or enrichment groups.

5. When students are finished with their exit tickets, remind them to review their work and rate their level of understanding in the top right corner of the exit ticket. You can read more about students rating their level of understanding HERE and HERE.

6. Collect the exit tickets and review them to assess student learning and understanding.

7. Use this information to form student groups (if necessary) and modify your teaching.

That’s it! In 3-5 minutes, you have all the information you need in order to move forward with PURPOSEFUL teaching.

All of the work has been done for you in my Differentiated Exit Ticket resources. Here is THE COMPLETE BUNDLE!

Quick, extremely meaningful feedback to transform your teaching, and the work has been done for you! Plus, they are NOW EDITABLE!

You can purchase all of my Differentiated Math Exit Tickets HERE or by clicking the button below.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Kristine-Nannini/Category/Differentiated-Math-No-Prep-Packs-267811?utm_source=YTL%20Blog&utm_campaign=Exit%20Tickets

26 Comments

  1. I wish you had ELA exit tickets! I love your format.

    1. Kristine Nannini says:

      Hi Cydney! Thanks so much! I do plan on creating ELA versions! Stay tuned! :)

    2. I was hoping for the same thing! I teacher 6th grade ELA and it is so hard to manage assessments as we teach sometimes 4, 5, or even 6 different standards at a time…

      1. Kristine Nannini says:

        Hi Keri- Thanks so much for your interest! Stay tuned! :)

        1. HI! Did you create ELA exit tickets? I would love to get them if you did.

          1. Kristine Nannini says:

            Hi Kayla- I have not yet. Make sure you follow my store to receive an email notification if I post them.

  2. Anne Post says:

    The links for differentiated exit tickets don’t seem to be working?

    1. Kristine Nannini says:

      Hi Anne- I just checked all the links and they work! If you are still having trouble, send me an email at nannini.kristine@yahoo.com and I will provide you with the links there. Thanks so much!

  3. I’m curious what do you do if students simply rush through their work and put little effort into a short answer question? Thanks!

    1. Kristine Nannini says:

      Hi Heidi- If you are struggling with this, I highly suggest a quick lesson with your students. You can model the correct way to slowly complete the exit ticket, and then check your work. You can also model the incorrect way to rush through your work. Allow students to see and understand the difference. When you model this for them, it will help tremendously with this problem. If you need additional help, don’t hesitate to send me an email at nannini.kristine@yahoo.com.

  4. Could you upload a template for exit tickets where we could edit and input our own questions? I like your format, especially where students can rate their level of understanding. I would love to purchase something like this. Thanks!

    1. Kristine Nannini says:

      Hi Jenelle- I updated the exit tickets to make them all editable. I hope that helps! Thanks for your kind words!

  5. Miriam Riley says:

    Will you be putting these into a bundle?

    1. Kristine Nannini says:

      Hi Miriam- These are now a part of a growing bundle! Just click the link in the blog post to check it out!

  6. YOU ARE AMAZING! I use exit tickets in the middle of math to see which students I need to pull for small group instruction–these tickets are perfect!

    1. Kristine Nannini says:

      Thank you so much, Mia! I love hearing that! Exit tickets are so powerful!

  7. Thinking about using this strategy in my high school Criminal Justice class. Using vocabulary, Constitutional Amendments, etc. Your thoughts?

    1. Kristine Nannini says:

      Hi Jimmy- I’m not too knowledgeable about high school Criminal Justice, but I definitely think you could use exit tickets to give your students formative assessments of the information.

  8. I think I remembering reading your math curriculum is Pearson Envision. If so, I am curious about the advantages to using this exit ticket over the the digital and paper quick checks that are provided. (* Not a huge fan of Envision and use a supplemental curriculum to support instruction, but I\’m curious about the reasoning.)

    1. Kristine Nannini says:

      Hi Karri- Thanks for your comments! The problem with Envision is that it teaches and assesses multiple standards at one time. Instead of covering one standard, and then seeing your students’ level of proficiency on that one standard, it mixes multiple standards into one chapter. When doing that, you never get an adequate reading of how your students are performing on an individual standard. When you teach one standard and then accurately assess that standard, you can see how proficient your student is on that particular standard. This information will then tell you whether your student needs interventions, re-teachings, or enrichment. I hope that helps! If you need more help, send me an email at nannini.kristine@yahoo.com.

  9. Thanks for a wonderful blog posting about the 2 types of assessments and the reasons supporting using exit tickets. Could you also do a blog about flip-flopping this by having entrance tickets?

    1. Kristine Nannini says:

      Thanks so much, Becca!

  10. Looking for ELA exit slips for 6th grade. Do you have any resources?

  11. Janet Carey says:

    Hi! Will you be creating Exit Tickets for Grade 6 Math? I love your format of the Exit Tickets. I will be buying the bundle as I can use some of the Grade 5 Exit Tickets. I would like to see some Grade 6 Exit Tickets that would address Ratios, Unit Rate, Measurement, Expressions/Variables, Volume, Surface Area, Orders of Operations, Data Analysis, etc. Love your Freebies…it keeps me coming back!

    1. Kristine Nannini says:

      Hi Janet- Thanks for your kind words! At this time, I do not have plans to create a 6th grade version. Sorry!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.