Exit Ticket Generator

Exit tickets, three to a page

An exit ticket is the small slip a class fills in during the last two minutes of a lesson and hands to you on the way out. This prints three of them per sheet, divided by dashed lines so one cut down the page and two across gives you a stack.

Each ticket carries the lesson title, a Name and Date line, and the questions you set.

Two or three questions, and no more

The default three are the standard set: something learned, something still unclear, and a confidence rating from 1 to 5. They are a reasonable starting point and you should replace them as soon as you have a lesson in mind.

What you should not do is add a fourth and a fifth. An exit ticket is answered in ninety seconds by a child who has already packed their bag, and a longer one gets one-word answers to every question rather than a real answer to two. The format's usefulness comes entirely from being short enough that everyone actually completes it.

The middle question is the one worth having

"What are you still unsure about" is the question that changes what you do tomorrow, and it is the one most often dropped for something more cheerful.

Ask it plainly. A class that has learned their exit tickets are read and acted on will tell you the truth on them, and thirty honest answers to that question is a better guide to the next lesson than any amount of watching faces during this one.

The confidence rating is useful mainly as a cross-check. A child who writes a good answer and rates themselves 2 is a different case from one who writes nothing and rates themselves 5, and both are worth a word.

How to make them cheap enough to actually use

Print a stack at the start of term with a generic title. Sort them into three piles as they come in — got it, nearly, lost — which takes under two minutes for a class of thirty and gives you your starter for the next lesson.

The failure mode is not the printing. It is collecting thirty tickets and never reading them, which teaches a class that the exercise is a ritual, after which the answers stop being worth reading and the whole thing is self-fulfilling.

On the form

Lesson title, your list of questions, and paper size A4 or US Letter. Three tickets per page is fixed.

Print at 100% so the dashed cutting lines land where they should. A guillotine does a page in one pass; scissors work fine.