PLAs #7 – Exit Ticket

As in PLA #8 – One Word, The Exit Ticket is an activity you do at the end of an activity, lesson, unit, project, presentation, midterm, or course. It’s a way to get students to critically reflect in some way that you decide, but it also pushes every individual to give you a response.

Unlike One Word, though, you allow your students to write a sentence or two, or a bullet point or two to summarise what they are learning. The Exit Ticket must be given to you before the student is allowed to leave the session, though, thus forcing responses from everyone. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: your students need to be in constant practice of self-reflection, and writing down a reflection helps to reinforce what they have learned, especially the most salient points. The Exit Ticket can help you adjust your lessons down the road, as it’s also a good example of formative feedback coming from your students about how your lessons are going.

Take advantage of participatory learning activities like this, and use them often, requesting different types of reflections as you go.

Nearpod and Padlet have tools where you can gather individual student responses to any prompt you give them that helps them to self-reflect on what they’ve learned.

Name: Exit Ticket

Activity type: Exit

HOTS: Learners critically reflect on the events of the activity, class, presentation, project, or unit, and must distill their thinking, producing a short summary of some kind.

Grouping: Best with ONES in an entire class, but if you use it more often, try using a breakout room to have them discuss in CIRCLES so that smaller groups who worked together can peer assess before they fill out their Exit Ticket.

Online tool: Try the “open-ended question” tool or the “collaborate” tool in Nearpod. Making a Padlet produces a similar result to the “collaborate” tool in Nearpod. A discussion board in BbL could also work if you want to extend the discussion out more.

This is the Top Ten Participatory Learning Activities (PLAs) Series. Each week, Dr. Larry Davies describes PLAs that are effective to use online. Your use of these PLAs will foster better learning and higher motivation in your learners. Each PLA contains an illustration that contains four elements:

• The name of the activity.
• Which one of the four types the activity is (that’s the lightbulb), including,
  • Creative/critical thinking activity (inside the lightbulb, top left – the brain);
  • Small group conversational activity (bottom left – the speech bubbles);
  • Exit activity (given at the end of a lesson, unit, or project) (top right – the exit sign);
  • Timed activity (where learners are under pressure to complete it within minutes) (bottom left – the clock).
• Whether it’s a Higher or Lower Order Thinking Skills Activity (HOTS or LOTS) (the HOTS/LOTS lever with “the pail”).
• A suggested grouping to maximize the benefit of the activity (the circles arranged in many ways).

Also, the description will contain suggestions for one or more online tools you can use with the PLA.

Previous blogs in this series include:

• PLAs #10 – The Empty Quarter
• PLAS #9 – Mindmap
• PLAs #8 – One Word