#406 – Engaging Bell Ringers and Exit Tickets

In this episode, the Unpacking Education podcast hosts dig into effective ways to open and close a class period. Throughout their conversation, they reflect on the benefits of beginning and ending routines, including the consistent use of bell ringer and exit ticket activities. They offer a wealth of specific examples that teachers can apply to their own classrooms.

The bookends of a class—the first few moments, and the wrap up at the end—can transform all the material addressed in the middle.

Andrew Boryga, in his Edutopia article, 14 Effective Opening and Closing Routines for Teachers

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• Graphic Organizers (resources)
• Digital Templates (resources)
• Creating Interactive Presentations with Curipod (article)

Supporting the Middle of a Lesson and Learning Day

The hosts agree that how a teacher begins and ends a lesson strongly impacts everything in the middle, which includes the main learning activities of the day. Taking time to intentionally establish routines for opening and closing the day can save time in the long run and solidify each day’s learning. The certainty of these routines also improves classroom management, provides more focus to a lesson, and supports students who thrive with the stability of structure. Tune in to hear insights and specific strategies from our hosts. Highlights include the following:

• Winston: “As a dean of students right now, I see kids walking out of classrooms 15 minutes before the end of class.” Exit ticket activities could mitigate this behavior.
• Paul: These strategies can be compared to a meal in the sense that they’re “like an appetizer at the beginning, and then leaving a review at the end, right? You can whet their appetite when they come in and get them hungry for more, and then at the end, you give them a chance to rate the place. You know, how did we do? And the teacher is the chef in that sense.”
• Winston: “I think the start of a class is so important. I think sometimes teachers forget to set students’ mental space.”
• Paul: “It sets the tone for everything that’s going to come. If students come in and there’s a lackadaisical start, or nobody knows what’s going on, that sets up the anticipation that nothing’s really gonna happen. . . . But if they come in there and there’s this mental readiness, they just know [that] when they come into class they need to engage in whatever the activity is that the teacher has set up. There’s this routine every day.”
• Paul: “I found, as a classroom teacher, that it was those students who had the most disruptive lives who appreciated those anticipatory activities the most. It gave them some certainty, some routine. It is a classroom management strategy as well, but it just gave them something to do. They didn’t have to sit there all by themselves, having nobody talk to them.”
• Rena: “It really transitions students into that learning mode. . . . When they come in and know exactly what to do and are getting started, that classroom feels so different than a room where everyone’s like, ‘I don’t know [and] have no idea what I’m doing,’ and it takes 10 minutes to get started.”
• Winston: “If a teacher has a good intro routine, they can get a lot of things that they need to get done, like . . . [taking] attendance, getting things organized, [and] passing paper around.”
• Paul: “That closure, it can serve so many different purposes, right? I mean, it can be that check-in at the end, so the teacher can see how the students did [and] give the students a chance to process what happened for the day. And I don’t think we should underestimate the intentional bringing together of all the things that were learned during the class. ‘. . . This is what happened. This is why we did everything.’”
• Winston: “I think sometimes teachers forget to give kids cliff-hangers, like: ‘Let me draw more about this. Let me find I want more of this.’ . . . Give that excitement to them to say, ‘Oh, what’s coming up next?’ . . . What are those bridges for students?”
• Rena: “I would make my kids practice. We would take 10–15 minutes passing in our papers. We would do it and do it until we could do it in like 10 seconds in a manner like, quickly, quickly, quickly. That’s just an example of one routine, but we did it that one day, and it saved me . . . so many minutes, which led to hours of instructional time.”
• Paul: The first days of school are “all about routines, and procedures, and things like that, and how that sets you up for not only classroom management but efficiency, even relationships, really, because there’s a trust in that routine and in . . . what’s going to happen each day. There’s a confidence that this is going to be a safe place for me.”
• Winston: “Routines are the easiest way to establish culture in a classroom because the kids know what’s expected, and they do, and they follow. It’s like the myth of Sisyphus, right, with the kid who has to push a rock up a hill every moment to be focused in the classroom. Knowing that there’s a routine allows them to not push that rock; that rock is stable at the top, and they can de-stress and focus on the learning space.”
• Winston: One of Winston’s favorite bell ringers is to focus on a student who got an answer wrong but in a way that the entire class can learn from. He says that even when answering incorrectly, it’s an “opportunity [for students] to say that ‘I’m valuable.’”
• Paul: “I always tried to have something that tied in with my learning objective for the day” and didn’t take too much time to prepare. “In creative writing, there was always a writing prompt, for instance, so they would always be writing to start the day. In a literature class, they’d start with maybe 5 or 10 minutes of reading their book of choice, and then we’d be doing something with that later on. Or another English class, maybe we would do a grammar activity.”
• Rena: “Kids might pull out something they did the day before, and they’re just sharing with their neighbor the best thing that they did. . . . So then, every kid gets to have something shared that they’re doing well. So it’s like, ‘What’s the best thing?’ because everyone’s doing good at something.
• Rena: “You have the silent debate, which I love because of the quiet, and they can do this all digitally. You post that question, which you want them to reflect on, or maybe it’s a question for what’s upcoming, or you’re just trying to gain knowledge about how they feel that day.”
• Rena: You can also share a flipped video to start the class, so all students get the lecture independently to begin the class, freeing up more class time for diving deeper into the content and applying it.
• Winston: For an exit ticket, students can write toward, “What’s the question going to be for tomorrow?” They could also write a quiz question for the day.
• Paul: “I like to take advantage of digital if I can, just because it automatically compiles the results, and you can just scan it real quickly. . . . But I would add, it doesn’t have to be tech either. . . . I would say, if it’s working, don’t force the tech in, but the tech can provide some efficiencies if you’re looking for a quick and efficient way to scan that feedback.”
• Rena: “I sometimes found paper much easier myself, just depending on what you do, bunch of sticky notes or if they’re literally just putting dots or paper, kind of like they could digitally, but just on a meter on their way out.”
• Rena: “Explain it to a five-year-old. So I want you to take what we did today, put it in your own words—maybe write [it]—but then you’re going to turn, you’re going to tell someone, [and] you’re going to pretend like you’re explaining it to a five-year-old.”
• Rena: Rena shares another exit ticket idea, “If I were writing an article about today, what would the headline be?”
• Rena: “What does data say that informs my instruction for tomorrow, to make it better for kids [and] to really improve their learning?”
• Paul: You can use a red-yellow-green light or a thumbs-up, thumbs-down approach.
• Rena: “I always feel like it needs to have a purpose.”
• Rena: Her toolkit item is to use AI chatbots, like SchoolAI’s sidekick.
• Winston: His tool is to use low-tech strategies to welcome students and help them feel safe in the classroom.
• Paul: Paul’s tool is similar to Rena’s, and that is to use custom AI chatbots to allow students to end the day with an interactive, personal conversation about the content of the day.
• Paul: Paul’s one thing is to “be intentional about the beginning and end.”
• Rena: Rena’s one thing is to begin with strong relationships, or the routines won’t be as successful.
• Winston: Winston’s one thing is to remember that the open and close of a lesson strengthens the middle—the main learning activities.