Writing Across the Curriculum: Exit Tickets - teaching students to compose "exit tickets" as a formative assessment technique.
Exit tickets are one of the best teaching strategies for getting students to immediately focus on the essential core content of lessons. They are particularly effective because they are designed to not only require the student to concentrate on the essential elements of a lesson, but then the students communicate succinctly using organized writing strategies.
The Exit Ticket will be used as a strategy for assessing learning in Science lessons. Students are often introduced to new vocabulary, information and facts that can be overwhelming. This is a tool that requires them to read and communicate the "essence" of the lesson which is a critical learning objective.
"At the heart of the Exit Ticket is an organized "hamburger" paragraph which contains a topic sentence, a minimum of three supporting details, and a concluding OR transitional sentence that leads to the next paragraph. By teaching the "hamburger" formula students will be immediately empowered and begin writing outstanding paragraphs in a matter of a few lessons.
Evaluation will become simpler we will employ peer grading and refer to a whole-class rubric for the first few lessons, teaching the students to recognize properly organized paragraphs and have them assess their own work as well as peer work. Students who are struggling with basic paragraph writing will be easily identified and receive additional attention. Once paragraphs have been mastered, the transition to short essays will be simple, and students will clearly grasp more subject-matter content in Science.
One Type of Exit Ticket we will use: The Hamburger Exit Ticket -
"At the heart of the Exit Ticket is an organized "hamburger" paragraph which contains a topic sentence, a minimum of three supporting details, and a concluding OR transitional sentence that leads to the next paragraph. By teaching the "hamburger" formula students will be immediately empowered and begin writing outstanding paragraphs in a matter of a few lessons.
Evaluation will become simpler we will employ peer grading and refer to a whole-class rubric for the first few lessons, teaching the students to recognize properly organized paragraphs and have them assess their own work as well as peer work. Students who are struggling with basic paragraph writing will be easily identified and receive additional attention. Once paragraphs have been mastered, the transition to short essays will be simple, and students will clearly grasp more subject-matter content in Science.
The Hamburger Paragraph Exit Ticket:
Exit Ticket Variation #1:
Important Book-inspired Exit Tickets. These passages are similar to hamburger paragraphs students are still learning paragraph basics. Once students understand the format,they can use this exit ticket method to write these paragraphs at the end of lectures, at the end of note-taking sessions, at the end of chapter readings: i.e. The important thing about DNA is... The important thing about mean, median, and mode is.
Exit Ticket Variation #2:
Non-Linguistic Exit Tickets. Robert Marzano's research (from Classroom Instruction that Works) discusses the importance of using more non-linguistic representations with students as a way to deepen their thinking, and Corbett's Non-Linguistic Exit Tickets require students to respond to an Exit Ticket question with two sentences and three non-linguistic representations.i.e.
