Exit tickets in the digital age

Exit tickets? What are they? When to use them? And how? Let’s see.

There are two delicate parts in every lesson: the lead-in and the wind-down. Of course, the main part is about the target language, but its success depends on how you introduce the topic. The same importance needs to be given also to the last five minutes of a lesson: if a student leaves your classroom excited, satisfied, their brain will connect the new grammar or vocabulary to previous knowledge – what’s more faster and with a great number of new connections. Whereas, annoyed and confused students block the new language in their brain and they will not be able to move it into their long-term memory, although they might have all the puzzle pieces to create connections between old and new. Therefore, it is essential to know what feelings your students have, while packing their backpack at the end of the lesson.

The way to understand this can happen in many ways, one of the most popular ones is called an ‘exit ticket’ or ‘exit slip’. They can literally be simple slips of paper. Exit tickets are very quick questionnaires about:
– what the students acquired in your lesson (Write down three words you learnt in today’s lesson:)
– how the student feels after the exercises (How do you feel? Happy Excited Confused Frustrated) and
– what they liked/disliked (Which exercise did you like the most?).

You can add other questions about any aspects of your lesson: social forms, skills to practise more, language to revise, etc.

Completing an exit ticket should not take more than 5 minutes and it doesn’t need to be done after each lesson, however, it can become part of the class routine (repeated every month, for instance).

Teaching a great deal of online lessons, you might also consider digital exit tickets. Google forms are an excellent way to create one. The real advantage of digital questionnaires is that they are automatically evaluated in the Responses section: you can see graphs with percentages and understand straight away, for example, how the class generally feel about the lesson and what vocabulary items they memorized. You an also ask them what type of exercises/games they really enjoyed and what they would like to review in future lessons.

Here is an example of a digital exit ticket for teens:

Find this exit ticket and two more for adult students and Young Learners in the ELT-TUTOR SHOP: