Super-Sizing my Exit tickets

As part of my Visible Learning journey, I have my students filling out an exit ticket (Google) form every day.  It takes them about 5 minutes.  It is evolving right in front of my eyes and I have to say, it is very exciting to me. ?

This summer I read Visible Learning.  It was a lot of theory and part of my thought, "Just get to the good stuff."  But I stuck with it and am so glad I did.  Here is why.  I really didn't know where to start this fall, with all of my new learnings.  With some support from some VL gurus, I made my small plan and set forth.  My main two things were daily exit tickets and having clear objectives and criteria.

As the exit ticket has evolved, it has become a lighthouse to my teaching.  Students report on their effort, understanding, and let me know if they have any questions or comments.  I've gotten comments like "Please make it less confusing." and "Could we have more work?"  Along with nice comments like, "Thanks for teaching us.  I know you had to plan for it."  

The questions on my form include:

• What was the learning goal for the day?
• Did you accomplish it?
• If so, why did you accomplish it? (I paid attention, I wanted to learn, Ms. Hostetler's instruction was clear, I asked questions, etc.)
• How do you know you accomplished it?  (criteria)
• How much effort did you put forth today?
• Tomorrow's goal is........how much do you know about this goal?

What I added recently was "forcing" them to write the learning goal for the day (I had been giving them multiple choice) and also giving them one or two multiple choice questions testing them on the content.  WOW.  How eye opening!  In one place I can see if I succeeded in being clear about the objective for the day.  And here's what I am becoming....my own evaluator and activator.  Kinda by stumbling into it, I have to say.  

I thought I had to do some big pre-test and post-test to see if I was being effective (and I am not ruling that out for future analysis).  I tried having small 3-5 question low stakes quizzes.  But something wasn't working.  It wasn't giving me the information I wanted about how I was teaching.  These tiny-bite questions in my exit ticket are so illuminating.  

Basically, I have super-sized my exit tickets and committed to doing them daily.  This is growth for me.  And for that, the celebration comes from joy of learning.