Tag: classroom management

Friendly Competition

MelissaLeave a comment

One of the best things about being a teacher is getting to have fun at work every single day. I have never understood uptight, grumpy, inflexible adults who continue to be teachers. Why would anyone want to spend their days like that, and why would you subject children to your bad attitude? I really don’t get it. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Anyhoo, no matter if my setting is a school or a hospital, I like to try to make our space as close to a “regular” classroom as I possibly can. And I believe that all classrooms should have fun in them! 

So for the days before Thanksgiving break, we had a Thanksgiving Throwdown in our classroom. I had morning classes (teens) versus afternoon classes (the “littles”–kids 5-13). Whichever group had the highest average of students completing their exit tickets and staying on task until clean up time was the winner and got candy the next day. The kids enjoyed it, and so did the hospital staff! Oftentimes I would find nurses looking over the stats or overhear conversations in the hallway about “Our kids need to do their exit tickets today!” It was great. 

The day we returned from Thanksgiving break I was taking down the sheets from my door and a hospital staff co-worker came by genuinely sad, asking if we were going to keep doing it. Well, yeah, of course we can! So the next day I introduced our Snowball Fight! The concept is pretty much the same. Whichever group has the highest percentage of students completing exit tickets wins a snowball. The same goes for the highest percentage of students on task until clean up time and the highest average on the behavior scale. Ties mean each group gets a snowball, so each group can get up to three snowballs every day. Our current prize is three snowballs equals candy for your group. I had thought about doing a bigger prize at the end of month before break, but since I won’t have the same kids then, I didn’t think that would be fair, so for now I’m sticking to candy, but if anyone has other ideas, please leave a comment and let me know!

Do you use contests in your classroom? What do you do? I’d love to hear about them!

Exit Tickets

MelissaLeave a comment

It’s common knowledge that good classroom management includes routines students are familiar with. When I started my new job this school year, I knew I would be moving students around in different groups, so I needed to run each group throughout the day in the same way. Therefore, I needed routines that would work well with students from kindergarten through twelfth grade and with a variety of educational and emotional needs. 

I decided to end each class with students completing an exit ticket. Most of the time, teachers use these to assess what students have learned or what questions they still have at the end of a class period. Since my day is structured into what is pretty much four sections of “resource room,” (each student working on something different than the student next to them) that wasn’t going to work in my setting. I wanted to make something that would ask students to reflect on their choices and behaviors during their hour of school each day. I also wanted useful information for myself and useful feedback for my learners. After many iterations, I came up with what we are currently using. I got the border and “exit ticket” words from a free file on Teachers Pay Teachers. Then I made the rest in Google docs, cut out the pieces, taped them on (because I’m super tech savvy-haha), and made copies; I get three tickets out of one piece of printer paper.

The current layout of my exit ticket

Students write their name and the date, then check off where they feel they fell on our four-point behavior scale (I’ll share this next time!). Next, they check off what they worked on. I added this for two reasons. Sometimes if I don’t get to my “charting” until the end of the day, I forget that Tommy worked on math while I was helping Sally with social studies. I also like to see if what they checked off matches up with what I observed. For example, if it looked like Mary was watching a video on the Pythagorean Theorem but checks off that she worked on English, I make a note to check on that with the student the next time I see them. After students turn these in, I check off what behavior scale number I observed them to be; then I leave a little note, a sticker, etc. I record both my score and the student’s score in my daily charting (I’ll share this tip in another post). 

This has given me extremely useful data. Is a student rating themselves very high or very low and that’s different from what I’m observing? Is a student having an exceptionally bad day? In many cases, students have written notes to me on the exit ticket about how they are feeling, that they need additional help, that they don’t feel safe, that they are sorry they didn’t do a lot of work that day for xyz reasons. Because they know I read these every day, they know what they write on them will be seen and taken seriously; they will be heard.

Do you use exit tickets in your classroom? What has worked well (or not so well)? If you don’t currently use them, consider giving them a try. What information would be most useful for you to get from your students? What feedback would be most beneficial to them? Use these as your guiding questions and you will end up with the exit ticket that is right for you!