Exit Tickets Without the Exit

A lot of us do exit tickets. For me, I just take them, sort them into "got it" and "don't got it" piles, glean whatever information I need and then throw them into the trash.

The amount of time vs. amount of information ratio is excellent. Up until now I had only used exit tickets when students were...exiting. 

Today, I realized I don't need to wait until the end of the period to do this. I had some notes we needed to take care of. Notes are not really my thing. I'm not so great at them. I give the "copy this down from the board" parts typed up and they annotate, draw pictures, do examples, etc. 

Today I was intro'ing the periodic table so I wanted my students to be able to read a chemical formula first. The notes looked like this:

(Note: Box.net is awful. If the embed isn't working, don't worry about it. The file is just a poorly written note page with a dotted line about 2/3 down and a few practice problems underneath.)

I partially cut along the dotted line. I direct taught it (GRR-style) and they took notes and did the example with me on the right hand side. We did the slow way of writing out H₂SO₄ three times and counting them up and then we did the quicker distributing way.

After a few practice problems the students worked on the bottom portion alone. The top part got pasted into their notebooks and they detached the bottom and turned it in.

Next we were going over to the lab tables (I have lab tables now!) to do Periodic Table card sorting. They had to be able to read a chemical formula in order to do it. Once the students were at their tables and getting started, I started sorting through the papers they turned in. 

I called over the "don't got it" pile, gave them a quick tutorial, and then sent them back to their groups once they had shown me they understood it now. 

It was less than 10 minutes from the time I started sorting to the time the last student went back to their group.


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Postscript 1: I see this as slightly different from something like a choice point which I think of as a mid-lesson correction.

Postscript 2: Writing this reminded me of hot reports which I have never blogged about. I can't find the original paper but I got the idea from Avi Hofstein. I will blog about them next but in case you can't wait they're referenced here as well.

(Update: This video on a teacher using Tiered Exit Cards came through my Twitter stream a couple of days ago).