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Exit tickets allow you to breathe for a couple of minutes before your next class period starts.
An exit ticket is like an Instant Pot. You hear about how great it is — it saves time, it’s simple, it’s flexible, and it doesn’t need many ingredients. It seems to be a staple tool at this point, so you pick one up and start using it. So it goes with exit tickets. When we start using them, it may be because of both convenience and necessity. They’re quick and easy, and they allow you to breathe for a couple of minutes before your next class period starts or you need to switch over to the next subject you’re teaching.
Exit tickets also provide a supportive rhythm to your class. They signal to kids that they will be transitioning soon, and this is invaluable to many students — especially if they struggle with change during their school day. Exit tickets provide a natural way to move from one space into the next, figuratively (if students stay in the same classroom) and literally (if students move to a new room). Sometimes that’s as far as we get with using exit tickets. It feels like enough, especially at the start of the school year or in the first year of your teaching career. But we can improve our use of exit tickets by taking them from simple (and valuable!) classroom tools and morphing them into invaluable formative assessments. “The power of exit tickets lies not only in informing instructional decisions — it includes the public acknowledgment of students' ideas and making adaptations of lessons, based on these responses, transparent to students (Marshall 2018). Importantly, exit tickets can also give voice to students who are otherwise silent in class, including English language learners and students "on the margins" of classroom life, and can draw your attention to who is being served in which ways, giving you critical information for shaping your practice to enhance equity and inclusivity.”
What is an exit ticket?
Backing up for a minute, let’s define an exit ticket. An exit ticket is a task that typically requires a short response from students. Teachers use exit tickets after an activity or learning period, and it can literally be the ticket to exit the room at the end of a period or a way for students to exit a part of the lesson. Exit tickets are not graded. Because they are not associated with a grade, students take on very little risk and can be honest about what they do and don’t understand, and may be more likely to ask questions they wouldn’t on a graded piece of writing.
Using exit tickets as formative assessments
Exit tickets can be used in any subject area at any grade level as formative assessments to provide teachers with authentic data, in real time. “To be effective, an exit ticket should have specific prompts for students and take only about five minutes to complete. Students can record their responses on index cards, sticky notes, notebook paper, or online (e.g., Google Forms, Padlet, Schoology, etc.). Ideally, student responses inform the next stages of learning by highlighting whether teachers should clarify ideas, reteach them, extend them, offer practice, introduce new ideas, or restructure future instructional activities (Marshall 2018).”
Making exit tickets your own means designing (or using templates) for short responses that you can read fairly quickly. This can be as simple as a sticky note on which students respond to a prompt with a few words or a What, So What, Now What chart.
At the end of a day, class period, or activity, you can engage in a quick cycle of inquiry with the data. 
1. Sort the data based on your own criteria from the lesson or for your specific students.
2. Examine each set of data. What do you notice? What needs attention?
3. Identify areas that need to be taught, retaught, or further investigated.
4. Adjust your next lesson to accommodate your findings.
5. Revise your next exit ticket (if needed) if you see that your prompt isn’t yielding useful data.
Using exit tickets as formative assessments is a promising practice that can be quick and can also support deep and differentiated learning in your classroom. Share with us your exit ticket practice below. Similar to Instant Pots, when you learn new ways to use them, it’s fun to share your findings with others!
Engage in low-inference observations that can lead to new discoveries about your students' needs.
Behavior is a form of communication.
Plug this sentence into your preferred search engine, and it will return enough results to keep you reading for hours. Since it’s more likely you’re scrolling through this post on your train ride, between classes, or at lunch than sitting with a cup of tea and hours to spare, let’s connect the dots quickly and consider a way to look at communication through behavior as data that we can analyze to determine a productive possibility in our classrooms.
Collect the data: what is the behavior?
Start with documenting low inference observations of behavior. As you jot down the description of the behavior, challenge yourself to write only what is observable. When you write, “a fight broke out,” ask yourself, “what did I actually see?”. What did you see? What did you hear? It’s worth the time it takes to develop your low inference observation skills, because you will be working from more accurate data, as free of assumptions as possible.
Analyze the data: what might it mean?
While you already have classroom expectations clearly outlined and students may be fully aware of the consequences of certain behaviors, whether it is a phone call home, a visit to the AP, or other intervention, you may also consider using a tool to support your own problem-solving. This is especially helpful when you’re confronted with a persistent, or even new, behavior. Lifelines is a tool we’ve used with our partner schools when looking at data reports together. With a few customizations, we can use this tool to explore behavior as data.
Consider possibilities: apply analysis to inform instruction
What questions, lessons, or interventions make sense to support the student and their learning? Is it an individual moment that is needed or could the whole class benefit from some time investigating this issue together? Try your lesson or intervention out. What happened? What other questions came up? What might you try next? If you continue to remain curious, your “final” determination in the Lifelines tool can be a starting point to a simple cycle of inquiry. 
By engaging your curiosity and making low inference observations of student behavior, you can engage in an inquiry cycle that could result in new and exciting discoveries about what your students’ behavior is communicating. Your findings can then support students academically by addressing their social-emotional needs.
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The Center for Professional Education of Teachers (CPET) at Teachers College, Columbia University is committed to making excellent and equitable education accessible worldwide. CPET unites theory and practice to promote transformational change. We design innovative projects, cultivate sustainable partnerships, and conduct research through direct and online services to youth and educators. Grounded in adult learning theories, our six core principles structure our customized approach and expand the capacities of educators around the world.
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