Exit tickets: why most teachers quietly stop using them

Exit tickets are one of the few teaching techniques with genuinely good evidence behind them. Short, low-stakes, at the end, everyone answers. The research is not ambiguous.

And yet. Ask around a staffroom and you'll find a lot of people who tried it, liked it, and stopped. Not because the idea was wrong.

Reason one: the pile

Thirty slips of paper. You collect them at the bell, you put them in your bag, and they come out again at four o'clock, or on Thursday.

By the time you read them you already know roughly who struggled, because you were in the room. The slips confirm a hunch you had three days ago. What they can't do is tell you anything you can still act on.

Reason two: the deadline you just gave yourself

To be worth its three minutes, an exit ticket has to be read before the next lesson. That's a hard deadline you have just created, five times a day, on top of everything else.

Most people manage it for a fortnight.

Reason three: the pupils you most need are the thinnest

There is a cruel pattern in exit tickets. The pupil who is lost writes "idk", or a single word, or nothing at all. The pupil who has got it writes three lines and a diagram.

You end up with the most information about the pupils you were least worried about, and a shrug from the ones who needed you.

Reason four: anonymous slips

Some teachers make them anonymous, on the reasonable grounds that pupils are more honest when it isn't attributable. They usually are.

But now you know that four people in the room don't understand, and you have no idea which four. It's an interesting fact rather than a useful one.

What exit tickets get right

Before throwing them out, notice that four of their properties are exactly right, and they are the four that matter:

• At the end, not the start. The information is freshest at the bell.
• Low stakes. No marks, no grade, so pupils answer honestly.
• Everyone answers. Not just the confident ones.
• One question, not ten. A single well-chosen question beats a worksheet.

Keep all four. The only thing that needs to change is the medium.

The same ritual, without the pile

One question on the board at the end of the lesson. Pupils type a class code into their phones — the same code all year, no accounts to create, nothing to install. Their answers land on your screen as they're packing up, attached to names, colour-coded.

You now have the thing paper couldn't give you: the answer while the pupils are still in the room. Which means the two minutes before the bell can be a reteach instead of the first ten minutes of the next lesson being a guess.

If you'd rather keep the paper

Fair enough — it costs nothing and it never runs out of battery. Two things make it work better:

• Don't collect thirty. Collect six, from the six you're genuinely unsure about. You'll read them at the bell, not at four o'clock.
• Don't make them anonymous. A check you can't act on isn't a check.

And if you use mini whiteboards for a quick show-me: they're fast, but everyone can see everyone, and the pupil who is lost can copy the board next to them before you look. For the confident-wrong and the quietly-lost, a private answer on a phone screen is more honest.

Questions people ask

Try it on one class.

One lesson. One question. Two minutes. If it doesn't tell you something you didn't already know, walk away.

Try it free — no card

Students need no account. They just need the code.