Tech Tools: Google Forms Exit Slips

Minor Reflection

Teaching is a balancing act and for better or worse we need to learn to balance.

We balance our free time and our devotion to preparing better lessons.

We balance the needs of our reluctant learners with the need to carry a class forward.

We balance formative assessment to inform teaching with some summative assessment to show the result.

There are lots of ways we can give students an opportunity to take ownership of their learning, promoting a growth mindset in our classrooms. Let's take a little bit of time to focus on some tools that you may use for formative assessment and some examples of great times to use them.

Exit Tickets

When I started teaching (4 years ago) the buzz of exit tickets to check for student understanding came about. Phrasing the Exit Ticket as the key to escaping the classroom before the bell rings adds an aspect of new favorite game Breakout EDU. It is a hard sell though convincing kids that doing 4 more problems to show procedural fluency is worthwhile. I have a hard time convincing myself that the end of class is the best time for this to happen.

Exit Tickets should be brief in any case. They should be equally quick to access as a tool in the classroom. If you are using 1:1 technology forms will work well. Google has a pre-made form that can be found here. Under the education forms, you can find Exit Ticket.

These are general questions that every student can answer like...
What's one important thing you learned in class today?
Did you feel prepared for today's lesson? Why or why not?
What would help make today's lesson more effective?

These questions are accessible to students and serve the purpose of students reflecting and simultaneously informing instruction.

This post by Rebecca Abler does a nice job showing other ways they can be utilized.