Teach Like a Champ vs. Teach Like a Chump: Exit Ticket

By Hannah Hensel, Director of Teacher Engagement

Key Idea:

End your lesson with a final At Bat, a question or a short sequence of problems to solve at the close of class. This will ensure that you always check for understanding in a way that provides you with strong data and thus critical insight. You’ll know how effective your lesson was, as measured by how well they learned it, not how well you thought you taught it.

Teach Like a Champ:

• They’re quick: one to three questions. That’s it. It’s not a unit quiz.
  • Get a good idea on the core part of your objective with ten minutes of analysis afterward.
• They’re designed to yield data.
  • The questions are fairly simple and focused on the objective. (If you ask a multi-step problem you may not know which part they didn’t get.) They also tend to vary formats with multiple choice and open-ended.
• They make great Do Nows.
  • After you’ve looked at the data, let your students do the same. Start the next day’s lesson by analyzing and re-teaching the Exit Ticket when students struggle.

Teach Like a Chump Says:

Assume you are a great teacher and you did a great job teaching. No need to double check your awesome work by having students do an exit ticket.