Exit ticket ideas: examples that tell you who got it

"Three things I learnt", "one question I still have", "confidence from one to five": they feel productive and tell you almost nothing. The pupil who is lost writes "nothing" or a 4. The pupil who has got it writes a paragraph you do not need.

This page is the questions. Why teachers start exit tickets and quietly drop them — the pile, the deadline, the anonymous slip — is a different problem, covered in why exit tickets get abandoned. The questions below are written so a wrong answer is useful. More of these notes are on the blog.

What a usable exit ticket does

Three tests, before you fall in love with a prompt.

• It cannot be copied off the board. If the definition is still up, asking for the definition checks eyesight. Take the worked example down, or ask something the example does not already say.
• A wrong answer has a shape. You should be able to guess two likely wrong answers before anyone writes. If every wrong answer just says "they didn't get it", the question is too vague to act on.
• You can sort it quickly. One question. Not eight. If you need a paragraph, you will read the first six slips and the rest will live in your bag until Friday.

Write the question before the last activity, not while they are packing away, and write the wrong answer you expect beside it. That is also how a hinge question is built. An exit ticket is the same instinct at the bell, when the decision is about tomorrow. Skip "how confident are you?" Confidence is not understanding.

Three shapes cover almost every subject. Ask for the first step, not the final answer. Give them a mistake a real pupil would make, and ask what is wrong with it. Or keep the idea and change the surface, so they cannot rely on the example you modelled.

Maths

Year 7, adding fractions. Do not set a long sum if you have two minutes. Ask: "1/2 + 1/3. What do you have to do before you can add, and why doesn't 2/5 work?" The pupil who has got it says the denominators count different sized pieces, so you need a common denominator. 2/5 is what you get if you add the tops and the bottoms. "Find the LCD", with no why, is the phrase without the idea. That is tomorrow's first example, not a new topic.

Year 10, straight-line graphs. "The line goes through (0, 2) and (3, 2). A pupil says the gradient is 2/3. What have they mixed up?" The gradient is 0. They treated a flat line as if the height and the width were both changes. You learn more from that than from "state the gradient of y = 2x + 1", which half the class can do by staring at the 2.

English

"Three things I learnt about the poem" is how exit tickets go to die. After embedding quotations: "Point: Lady Macbeth is in control at the start. Write one sentence that supports it with a short quotation. Punctuation included." You will see who can use a quote and who drops in a whole line and hopes.

After commas and clauses, put up: "The book that I borrowed is late." Ask them to rewrite it so the extra information is non-essential, and to name the punctuation they added. You are hoping for something like "The book, which I borrowed, is late." A comma before "that" is a specific error, and a better start to tomorrow than "revise punctuation".

Science

Photosynthesis, usually Year 8. "A plant is kept in the dark, watered, in a room with normal air. A pupil says it will die because it runs out of oxygen. What is the better explanation?" You want light, photosynthesis, and food. Oxygen is the gas they remember. The word equation would only tell you who can reproduce the board.

Series circuits, GCSE. "You add a second identical bulb in series. What happens to the current, and what happens to the brightness? One sentence each." Listen for "the current is the same all the way round" against "the first bulb uses the current up". Brightness falls because the bulbs share the voltage, not because the current has been spent.

Humanities

History. "This source was written by the king's clerk and says the king was loved by all his people. Give one thing it can be evidence of, and one thing it cannot prove." You want what the clerk wanted written down, and not a proof that everyone loved the king. "It's biased so it's useless" is the answer to reteach. Bias is a reason to read carefully, not a reason to throw the source out.

Geography. "In a river meander, why is the outside bend usually deeper? Do not copy the diagram." You are listening for faster flow and erosion on the outside. If the board still says that, take it down before they answer. RE or citizenship, after an argument: "Give one reason a reasonable person might disagree with the view you argued today." Pupils who only collected your phrases cannot.

Languages, computing, practical subjects

French, after the perfect tense. "Write one true sentence about what you did yesterday, and the English underneath." "J'ai allé" is tomorrow's starter. A list of twenty verbs copied from the book is not.

Computing. Put up total = 10, then total + 5, then print(total). "Why does this print 10 and not 15?" The second line works out 15 and throws it away. Nothing stores the new value. That is a better exit ticket than "define a variable".

PE. "Name the component of fitness today's session was actually training, and one thing you would see if it improved." "Fitness" is not an answer. Art or design: "What did you change after your first attempt, and what were you hoping it would do?" "I added more detail" is thin. "I made the handle wider because the first one slipped" is a decision.

What to do with the answers you actually have time for

Sort the answers into three piles. You will not deep-mark thirty slips before the bus.

• Got the point. Move on. You might ask one of them to start tomorrow's explanation, so the recap is not you talking again.
• Nearly. They have the method and a hole in the reason. One fresh example at the start, not a replay of the hour.
• A specific wrong idea. This is the pile that matters. They did not "fail to revise". They built the wrong model. Reteach that model.

Put names on. Anonymous slips tell you the piles exist and not who is in them. The next morning, repeat the question with the surface changed. That is a retrieval starter, and it shows whether yesterday's correction survived the evening.

If the carrier bag of paper is why you stopped, the question does not have to live on a slip. Get It? drafts the questions, you edit them, and pupils answer on a phone or a school device with a code. No account. In two minutes you see who has got it, who is unsure, and who needs help. Free for a limited time, no card. If the room has no devices, use the slip.

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.