How to Take Your Exit-Ticket to the Spiderverse!

There's an ancient mantra in education that goes somewhat like this:

" If you give kid a text about Spiderman, and they can't find the main idea, then that kid does not know how to find the main idea"

I'm just messing with you, that's no mantra, but if your Spidey senses are tingling because you've seen this happen in your classroom, then you know the proverbial dilema that all ELA teachers struggle with when it comes to making exit tickets: How do I test student mastery of the standard I'm covering today, if my students won't even engage with the text?

Well, an actually real mantra that all great teachers live by is the concept of getting students to fall in love with reading by giving them texts that match their interests and reflect their identity. So today, I am going to enlist the help of the great Miles Morales, Harlem's very own Spiderman, and his trusty sidekick, Planning Period's Assessment Generator,  to measure our fifth graders'  mastery of finding main ideas in an informational text, AKA, the CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.5.2  standard (IYKYK).

For my "Merlin,  recess is too short to read this" people:

• ✅ Create an Exit Ticket Using Your Own Text
• 🎨 Tips on Personalizing Your Assessments
• 📚 Three Different Ways to Bring Your Text Using Planning Period

BYOT (Bring your Own Text)

If I want to use Spiderman as the textual focus of my exit-tickets for the rest of the week, then the first thing I'll do is look for quality texts about our friendly neighborhood hero. In this case, I found a very relatable article featured in Variety Magazine, highlighting how 14-year-old Preson Mutanga, was hired as an animator for the latest Spiderman Movie, 'Spider-Man:Across the Spider-Verse'. Below are the steps I would follow to make an exit ticket for it.

1. Log into planningperiod.io
2. Select the Assessment Creator Tool.
3. Select the standard type, subject and grade level, in this case I'm measuring a 5th grade, ELA, Common Core standard
4. Select the standard you want to measure, I'm doing CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.5.2
5. Paste the Variety article in the passage box
6. Select the type of Assesment: I'm choosing exit ticket (this will make the tool cross-check exit ticket examples)
7. Select the type of questions: I went for multiple choice!
8. Select the number of questions: I'm choosing 2 questions because I want them to complete this in the very last 5 to 10 minutes of class.
9. Hit submit!

Then I'll let Planning Period use its multilayered-AI system to generate a standard-aligned exit ticket based on this text that I am sure my students will love. But I know my job here is not done!  

With Great Exit-Ticket Powers, Come Great Responsibilities

Teacher responsibility does not end when the Assessment Creator tool produces an Exit-ticket. In fact, that's when it begins! Here's a couple of things I'd do to integrate my new Spider-versed exit-ticket into my classroom:

• Read & adjust: I would cross-check the questions and the answer key to ensure I am satisfied with the exit ticket. I may even change some of the ways the questions are asked depending any particular student needs in my classroom (I'm specifically thinking about my students with IEPs and my ENL students).

• Download to word/Google Doc and personalize: I may print the original article and give the students the questions separately in 1/4-lenght piece of paper so that they can first engage with the text in its original format, and then answer a tiny exit ticket once they're done reading (yes, the size of the paper influences student perception!)

• Integrate it with other tools: Maybe I'll assign it on my Google Classroom, or implement it as a Nearpod survey! The posibilites are endless!

The truth of the matter is, we built Planning Period not only to save teachers time, but to help them continue to rise to the awesome responsibility that comes with the power of teaching: Making sure that everything we put in front of our students is truly beneficial to their learning journey. As much of a hand  AI-powered tools can have on making lesson planning more efficient, the spider-web that glues it all together is the teacher's knowledge of their students, and their ability to integrate that in the classroom materials.

Explore a Multiverse of Possibilities

With Planning Period's suite  you can invite all of your Spider-friends to help you create standards-aligned resources that reflects who your students are and leverage their interests to drive engagement! Check out three more ways to BYOT to your lessons at different grade levels:

1. Esperanza Rising(Upper elementary): Use our CFU Maker to infuse your read-aloud with Checks for Understanding that make the students move, speak or write!

2. The Science of Star Wars(Middle School): Use our Stations Planner to create your very own Star Wars Space Stations where your students can work independently while you support a small group!

3. Excerpt from The Hate U Give (High School): Give your student's extra credit for answering standards-aligned questions while they read Chapter 1 of Angie Thomas' The HATE U Give.

Click here to access excerpt for the texts above

Now get out there, and explore the multiverse of posibilites Planning Period has in store for you!