Jay Altman describes a lesson taught by the maths teacher in Boston whose students achieved the best value-added scores in the state. Students entered, listened, practised, wrote exit tickets and left. Surprised, Altman asked what the teacher was doing differently: the teacher responded that he examined the exit tickets and helped any student who had struggled to master the lessons’s content. That afternoon.
Imitating a feedback loop achieved in a Boston charter proved challenging in a British comprehensive. But the fundamental idea – frequent assessment of student understanding and rapid action – is incredibly powerful. Moreover, introducing exit seems to have a transformative effect on teachers, modifying their sense of students’ understanding and hence of the best actions they can take. After attending to careful setting of objectives, introducing exit tickets may be the most powerful change a teacher can make.
In discussing mastery learning (a relatively well-evidenced approach promoted by the EEF Toolkit), the authors…
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The Echo Chamber 