How to write an exit ticket for any lesson

Exit tickets have a slightly corporate ring to them — the kind of phrase that gets introduced at an INSET day and then disappears into normal teaching practice once everyone has stopped using the term. But the underlying idea is genuinely useful, and worth understanding properly.

What an exit ticket actually is

An exit ticket is a brief, low-stakes assessment that happens at the end of a lesson. It gives you a quick picture of what your pupils understood and what they didn't — information you can use to plan the next lesson, group pupils for support, or simply to know whether the class is ready to move on.

It doesn't need to be a printed slip of paper. It can be a whiteboard response, a hand signal, a quick verbal check, or a few written lines. The format is less important than the principle: before the lesson ends, you find out where everyone is.

What makes a good exit ticket

The best exit tickets have three qualities.

They are quick. A question that takes twenty minutes to answer is not a formative assessment — it's another task. Exit tickets should take five minutes or less, often two or three.

They are targeted. A vague question (“What did you learn today?”) generates vague answers. A specific question (“Can you give me one example of a fronted adverbial and explain why you've used a comma there?”) tells you something precise.

They match the lesson objective. If you taught pupils to subtract fractions with different denominators today, ask them to do one — not something tangentially related that doesn't tell you anything about today's specific teaching.

Formats that work

Multiple choice — one question, four options. Quick to complete, quick to assess. Particularly useful when there is a common misconception you're checking for (build the misconception into one of the wrong answers and see who selects it).

Short answer — one question requiring a few sentences. Good for English and humanities, where you want to see how a pupil constructs an argument, not just whether they know the answer.

Two truths and a misconception — present three statements about today's topic, two correct and one wrong, and ask pupils to identify which is the misconception and explain why. Higher order but still brief.

The muddiest point — ask pupils to write down the one thing they are still least sure about. Useful when you suspect the class are performing understanding rather than demonstrating it.

How to use the information

An exit ticket you collect but don't act on is marking for no purpose. Keep it brief so you can actually review them: a class set of multiple choice responses takes five minutes to scan. What you're looking for is patterns — three pupils struggling with the same thing suggests a gap; half the class struggling suggests you need to reteach.

Use what you find to shape the next lesson's opening. A five-minute re-teach of a misconception at the start of the following day, prompted by what the exit tickets told you, is more efficient than discovering the gap three weeks later in a test.