By G. FAITH LITTLE

​We check for understanding constantly, don’t we?

“Does that make sense?”
"Know what I mean?”
“Get it?”

When it comes to our classrooms, we’re looking for more precise ways to check for understanding. Here are some simple ways and a few tools to use in your class as soon as tomorrow!

Thumbs up!

A simple and positive hand gesture can check to see who is hearing your instruction and who needs more support to move forward. You can use this: 

• on the board: Thumbs up when you’re on page 49 and ready to read.
• out loud: Thumbs up if you remember two rules of volleyball. Three? Four? More?
• on a slide: Thumbs up if you’ve written down a question about the periodic table. 

Choose your emoji

Expressions are a helpful way for students to share how they’re feeling or thinking about new or challenging content. It is especially useful for English Language Learners and Students with Disabilities. Using emojis (which can be individual cut outs or together on one piece of paper), ask students to choose the emoji that best represents their current experience.

As you move around the room, you can customize your questions and support. Find out more about what the happy faces understand, what the thinking faces are working out, and what the sad faces need to make their struggle productive.

Entrance tickets

See how the homework informed thinking or where yesterday’s mini-lesson landed by collecting a little data at the beginning of class. You can even combine this tool with the emojis you've used previously:

• On the board: Choose the emoji that best describes your experience as you work out today’s problem.
• Out loud: Show your emoji! Let me know how you’re experiencing this reading.
• On a slide: Which emoji represents where you are with writing up your experiment notes?

Whatever the tool, getting clear feedback is key to differentiating your instruction and increasing communication with your students!

By G. FAITH LITTLE

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. 

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. 

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.

• Example: students who demonstrated they understand the concept, students who demonstrated they somewhat understand, and students who provided no evidence of understanding.

2. Examine each set of data. What do you notice? What needs attention?

• Example: a third of the students mentioned key terms from the lesson. 

3. Identify areas that need to be taught, retaught, or further investigated.

• Example: need to revisit primary colors

4. Adjust your next lesson to accommodate your findings.

• Example: start tomorrow’s lesson pairing students to share their knowledge

5. Revise your next exit ticket (if needed)  if you see that your prompt isn’t yielding useful data.

• Example: “Did you learn what osmosis was?” didn’t show me what they knew, only if they thought they learned the concept. Revise to an open-ended prompt.

​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!

By G. FAITH LITTLE

By the time you’ve cultivated a course curriculum, it’s easy to run out of steam as you move into building a unit plan, the detailed guide that will support your lesson planning. One way to make the most of your time and energy is to plan using a batching strategy. We can think of this like grocery shopping for the week.

If I walk down the aisles (online or in real life), filling my basket with ingredients for Monday (breakfast, lunch, dinner) then Tuesday (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and so on, the trip will take a while. If I shop by meal type, like breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, I cut down on the time and effort I spend. Of course, it’s even faster when I identify ingredients that can be used for more than one meal type. I pick up eggs to scramble for my breakfast sandwich and hard boil for my evening salads. I grab apples to go in my lunch box and morning smoothie. 

Like grocery shopping, when we identify areas in our unit plan that we can create or gather in batches, we cut down on the time we need to design that part of our plan. For instance, if we want to include transition tools for teachers to use in their lesson planning, we could develop our list in a batch starting with our own ideas and incorporating others:
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• Write down the transitions regularly used in the classroom
• Ask colleagues to share their favorite ways to transition between activities
• Ask students which transitions work best for them

Batch your transitions depending on what you and your students need in the classroom — is it about needing time? Do you want students to read, write, or talk to one another, or should they quietly move from one activity to the next? Do your transitions depend on whether students are individually working or in groups? Batch them in a way that works best for you, and drop the transitions you’ve collected into the batch that makes most sense:

One you have your lists together, it’s simple to drop transition tools, one at a time, into logical places in each unit plan. Even quicker, and possibly more empowering for other teachers, is to turn the list into a menu of options teachers can use to find what works best for their teaching style, content area, and students. 
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Here’s a menu we developed for educators at Jewish Home Lifecare who were teaching students how to provide services that support health, individuality, and dignity to elders. This menu allowed novice teachers to review a number of options and find transitions that were a match for their teaching style and their students for that session. Even the simplest of menus can be a good jumping off point for generating new ideas!

Whiteboard agenda

Writing out a simple agenda is helpful for easing transitions — it makes it clear where we are and what's to come. Write agenda on the whiteboard (sample below):
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• Welcome and please take out HW and ...
• Read page ___ and underline what strikes you about ___
• Pair share
• Group share
• Come up with discussion questions
• Vote on best discussion question for tomorrow 
• HW: write a page-long response to the discussion question (to prep for discussion tomorrow) 

Check items off the list as you complete each activity/task so students know where they are in the plan for the day. Invite a student to read off what’s next as you go through the day and/or to reiterate what they’ve already accomplished. 

Bonus tip: Have a very chatty/active student? Make them Agenda Leader for the day. They should help you stay on schedule by recounting what has been done and reading what should happen next.

Time to learn!

Play this as a little game that will result in a call & response. The more you practice this, the more the students will come to experience it as a cue to look up and engage. It takes a bit of time, so be bold and power through until this becomes a ritual. 
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• Instructor: What time is it? 
• Students: It’s time to learn! 
• In the split-second moment of silence after students use their breath to answer, jump in with an instruction to get them on their next task. 

This also works to get them back on their current task if they get distracted. Play around with ways to use this method, modifying it to fit what works for you and your students.

Organizing student groups

One of the hardest transitions to make is moving from individual work to group work. An effective way to guide grouping is to use post-it notes with a number or a letter, colored paper, or even playing cards. Using one of these items helps students organize themselves in their groups all at once, rather than calling out every student's name individually or having students wander around the room "looking" for a group.
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• Colored paper: Cut strips of paper out of three different colors of paper until you have enough for your group. Shuffle. Pass around the squares/strips and ask students to gather with others who have their same color paper.

 

• Playing cards: From a deck of cards, take out 3 Kings, Queens, Jacks, and so on until you have enough for your group. Shuffle, then deal the cards (or ask a student to deal the cards).

 

• Sticky notes: Write the numbers 1, 2, and 3, on the back of individual sticky notes, until you have enough for your group. Post notes on wall or table, and ask students to choose one sticky note & find the others with their number to form their group.

Two-minute timer

Two minutes before one activity ends and another begins, make announcements about how much time is left and what students will be doing next (including what they need to have to move forward).

Examples: 

• "In two minutes we'll finish our reading and begin the activity. You'll need your notebook and a pencil."
• "One more minute and we'll begin the activity ... I'm looking for notebooks and pencils ..."
• "Okay now we're finished reading and are ready to begin the activity ... I see ___# of students are ready, and we're waiting on # more."

Deep breath
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• Take a deep, cleansing breath. 
• Exhale, and let students know it's time to take a breath and move back into group: "I'll know we're ready once we're all breathing together." 
• Take another deep breath and acknowledge students who have joined you by name: "Thank you, Marisol. Thank you Devon." 
• Repeat instructions. Continue process until all have joined. 

You're ready to move on to the next instruction!