EXIT SLIPS--Excellent Tool for Quick Assessments

All too often, teachers spend hours designing quality lessons that they believe will lead to a wonderful learning experience for all students in their classes.  However, with more classrooms becoming increasingly diverse in student needs, teachers sometimes feel overwhelmed in planning for every possible scenario--English language learners at all levels of learning the language, students with special learning needs, native speakers of English with weak educational backgrounds, students from economically disadvantaged home settings, etc. 

So within such a setting, what can teachers do to ensure that the vast majority of students master the major concepts of the lesson?  In two words:  EXIT SLIPS.  This tool provides quick assessments of how well each student understood the lesson.   Since they are ungraded, students do not stress over them.  When teachers explain that this tool will help identify students who struggle so that the teacher can devise additional instructional tools to help them, students welcome them.  After all, if they do well, their self-confidence soars.  If they don't do well, they know that the teacher will help them grasp the lesson. 

Here are some video clips on teachers using these tools to guide their instruction. The first one is on the use of exit slips in a high school math classroom.  The second one demonstrates their use in a 3rd grade classroom.

Remember that exit slips are good for all grade levels and in all content areas.  Use them and watch student academic performance improve dramatically!

Denise

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EXIT SLIPS: Highly Effective Formative Assessment Tool For ALL Content Areas

Common core will enable teachers to deliver far more powerful, and therefore more effective, lessons than in the past.  This radical change in instruction which will reach a much greater student audience including the rapidly growing English language learner population. 

With this new approach to approaching learning (more emphasis on informational text with practical applications to the real world), teachers will need to monitor student grasp of key concepts every few minutes.  This checking-for-understanding (cfu) must go beyond simply asking a few questions on what a teacher just lectured about to those few students who have their hands up to answer questions.  To engage all students (and hold them accountable for learning), teachers must have a variety of tools to use throughout a lesson to make sure that students who don't understand the point of the lesson can be quickly identified and supported.  This is how a teacher can be sure that at least 80% of the students are fully prepared to go on to more complex work, start individual assignments, attempt the homework assignment, etc.  For that 20% who are lost, the teacher can pull them aside to offer a mini-lesson (typically such lessons only last for a few minutes where problems are quickly sorted out and addressed in a format that is more easily understood).

Though there are many techniques to check for student understanding, one popular one is EXIT SLIPS.  It can take several forms from half-slips to index cards (and more).  What ever tool is used, it should not be overwhelming in size (no 8 X11 sheet of paper for example).  English language learners are especially intimidated by paper that size.  An index card is less scary and more effective since students want to fill up the card with everything that they can recall whereas an 8 X11 leads to writer's block.  The link in this blog does offer some PDF with various types of exit slips.  They should serve as models.  They are here just to provide some examples of what is out there.

Typically, this type of assessment takes only about 5 minutes of class time.  Students can turn them in as they leave the room (hence "exit slip") or just before the teacher enters closure (a last check before students move on to assignments based on the class lesson or before they start homework).  If the teacher gives this assessment as an EXIT TICKET, s/he would review the results before the start of the next class and then open up the class with either a review of the areas the students didn't understand or some praise on the results and move into the next lesson.  Again, this is only one tool of many a teacher should weave into classroom instruction.

Denise

ELL TEACHER PROS

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