I think exit tickets are a great way of assessing knowledge at the end of a lesson, encouraging pupil reflection and consolidating content to encourage retention. I have used a variety of different layouts of exit tickets, but they usually require an answer to a question that has been selected from the IWB or a sentence explaining what they have learnt during the lesson.

I always want the pupil’s name on the ticket, otherwise it is useless to me regarding targeted support, however if pupils do not put their name on the ticket it is still useful to gage whole class understanding and progress.

I sometimes ask pupils to complete a specific differentiated task or draw an image that demonstrates their understanding of the content of the lesson. Also I sometimes use exit tickets as a way to revisit material from previous weeks to assess retention.

A way to make exit tickets even more useful for future planning is by having different boxes or folders for the pupils to post their tickets into. These could be red, amber, green coloured boxes or ‘I understood all of it’, ‘I understood some of it’, ‘I understood none of it’ labelled boxes to easily sort responses into.