How to Make Exit Tickets—Fast and Easy

TL;DR

(Instructional Guidance, Transcript, and Prompts below)

The Purpose of Exit Tickets

Exit tickets, sometimes called “bell ringers,” help teachers quickly assess what students learned by the end of class. Their real purpose isn’t grading—it’s to inform instructional planning. Teachers use them to understand whether students grasped key concepts, can apply what they learned, and what content needs reinforcement.

How AI Helps

AI can simplify the process of developing meaningful exit tickets aligned with your lessons. By providing context, purpose, and a clear task in your prompt, AI can generate questions tailored to your subject and grade level. This allows teachers to focus more on analyzing student responses rather than spending time writing new exit tickets.

Step 1: Differentiated Exit Tickets Using Bloom’s Taxonomy

To create differentiated questions, teachers can use AI to design one question for each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy—Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. This offers multiple ways to measure understanding and supports differentiated instruction. Teachers can select the question that best fits their lesson depth or provide options for students at various levels of learning.

Step 2: Mini Pop-Quiz Exit Tickets

Teachers can also ask AI to create short, focused assessments such as one fill-in-the-blank and one multiple-choice question. These serve as quick “spot checks” for comprehension, taking only a few seconds for students to complete. The results reveal how well students retained key ideas and guide what to revisit in the next class.

Step 3: Building a Toolkit of Exit Tickets

AI can generate a full set of diverse exit tickets—such as fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice, short answer, matching, and true/false formats—so teachers can rotate them throughout a unit. Teachers can then request additional examples of their preferred type (e.g., several true/false questions) for variety and efficiency.

Conclusion

AI enables teachers to quickly create effective, differentiated exit tickets that make learning visible. By using these prompts and techniques, educators can better gauge student understanding and plan their next instructional steps with confidence.

Teacher Take-aways

Pedagogical and Instructional Implications

Exit tickets function best as formative assessment tools rather than quick quizzes. Their primary value lies in helping teachers determine what students actually learned during a lesson and how effectively the instruction met its goals. When used this way, exit tickets guide immediate instructional decisions—whether to reteach, reinforce, or extend learning.

A strong pedagogical approach treats each exit ticket as feedback on the day’s teaching. Teachers examine student responses to identify patterns of understanding or misconception, using that data to plan the next steps. This creates a responsive cycle of teaching, checking, and adjusting that ensures instruction remains aligned with student needs.

Differentiation can be achieved by designing exit ticket questions at multiple levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Questions targeting “Remember” or “Understand” check foundational knowledge, while “Apply,” “Analyze,” “Evaluate,” and “Create” levels assess deeper cognitive engagement. Teachers can select the most appropriate question for the day or assign different levels to students based on readiness, ensuring that assessment matches both learning objectives and student ability.

Variety in format also enhances engagement and insight. Quick fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice questions offer efficient checks for understanding, while short-answer, matching, or true/false prompts allow students to demonstrate reasoning and comprehension. Rotating among formats keeps end-of-class routines fresh and provides richer evidence of student thinking.

Ultimately, exit tickets are most effective when intentionally designed to reflect lesson goals and analyzed to guide next steps. Used consistently, they transform brief end-of-class moments into powerful tools for formative assessment and adaptive teaching.

AI Support and Use

Teachers can use AI to create exit tickets that directly support formative assessment and instructional planning. By combining sound pedagogy with AI’s ability to generate varied, targeted questions, educators can streamline their workflow and focus on interpreting learning data rather than writing prompts. Here’s how teachers can use AI to implement these strategies effectively:

  1. Clarify the Learning Context: Begin each AI prompt with clear context—grade level, subject, and specific learning goal. This ensures AI-generated exit tickets align closely with lesson content.

  2. Use AI for Formative Assessment Design: Ask AI to create a single exit ticket question for each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.Select or adapt the question that best matches your students’ current depth of understanding.

  3. Generate Quick Comprehension Checks: Use AI to design short, efficient assessments such as one fill-in-the-blank and one multiple-choice question.

  4. Develop a Rotating Toolkit of Exit Tickets: Ask AI to produce five to ten different types of exit tickets on the same topic—short answer, true/false, matching, multiple choice, etc. Rotate them over several days to maintain engagement and gather broader evidence of learning.

  5. Refine and Extend with AI Iteration: After identifying an effective question format, prompt AI for variations.

  6. Analyze and Apply Results: Collect responses, identify misconceptions, and use the findings to modify lesson plans. AI can also assist in categorizing or summarizing student responses to support data-driven instructional decisions.

When applied this way, AI becomes a tool for instructional improvement: helping teachers quickly produce differentiated, standards-aligned exit tickets and to use student responses to guide the next day’s teaching.

Full Transcript and Prompts

The Purpose and Use of Exit Tickets

I love exit tickets or as they’re sometimes called “bell ringers.” Like what do you do just before the bell rings?

Now we can use them for a lot of different reasons obviously. We can do a quick spot check of students understanding a little tiny mini pop quiz at the end of the day. We can use it to reinforce the content to give chance for students to see how the content applies further.

But their big value, the real purpose of a bell ringer or an exit ticket, is for you to inform your instructional planning going forward. Because the question you’re trying to answer honestly is having done some stuff during the class or during the day, did students get it? Can they use it? Do they understand it? What did they take from your instructional delivery and the opportunities that you created?

So, the real purpose is for you to decide how well did you do with the content and where do you go next?

Do you give them points? Maybe a few, but nothing major. Do you use them to figure out what kids need to go where they need to go next? Absolutely 100%.

That’s really their big value, but they can be a little tricky to develop, especially if you’re trying to tie them to the content you’ve been teaching.

So, we’re going to use AI to help facilitate that process. And for once, we’re actually going to do it all in the same discussion thread. We’re going to do it with three prompts.

1. Challenge Questions (with Bloom’s Taxonomy)

The first prompt, we are setting up the scenario. We’re providing the context and what it is that you’re trying to get out of it.

Every prompt has got context and purpose and task. So, our context is ninth grade class and what they’re studying. So what did they do during the day?

The purpose is for you to gauge their level of understanding. And of course, the task then is we need an exit ticket, and we’re going to use AI to help generate those. All right, so let’s start here with this one.

Prompt

In my 9th grade class, students are studying how ancient Greeks used mythology to explain natural phenomena before scientific methods were introduced.

To gauge their level of understanding, I would like an exit ticket for students that contains a single question for students to answer.

To differentiate among student levels, please create a single question for each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

In my ninth-grade class, students studying how ancient Greeks used mythology to explain natural phenomena before scientific methods were introduced. Okay, gauge their level of understanding. And what are we going to do? An exit ticket for students. And in this case, we’re going to just give them a single question to answer. However, we’re going to do it a little bit differently.

We know that students are at different levels and different types of understanding. So, we need some way to differentiate because not every kid needs the exact same exit ticket. Or based on your sense of the depth of the content and the activities they engaged in, maybe you want something a little more challenging, some application or something a little less.

So, this part right here is going to work for just about any subject and any grade level. We’ve defined it further with the context above in the prompt. So, let’s start here.

And of course, anytime we’re talking about differentiation and looking for meaning and understanding, depth of understanding, we are always going to turn to Bloom’s taxonomy. And we’re going to do that here as well. So what do we have to differentiate?

Please create a single question for each level of Bloom’s taxonomy.

Am I going to use them all, every one of them as a teacher? No. Am I going to provide a few options to kids? Probably. Am I going to pick and choose what I think is the most appropriate one? Absolutely. So let’s start there.

And what we should get is a variety of questions, all the way from just “Do you know the facts?” up to “Can you apply it?”

And this is the one of the ways that we can use this basic prompt, the second half that you see there across multiple grades and across multiple content areas and student groups. Okay.

So what have we got? A single exit ticket for each level. All connected to the topic of and there’s my topic. And now what do we have? We’ve got “remember,” “understand,” “apply,”  “analyze,” “evaluate,” and “create.” So we’ve got every level of Bloom’s taxonomy. And we have one thing for students to do, one question or one demonstration at each level.

So, that’s great. And now we’ve got the ability to differentiate or to gauge which one is going to be most appropriate based on where you are in the exploration of the content. Sometimes you want a little simpler, sometimes you want a little more in-depth and comprehensive. And this approach gives you one of everything. So this is great.

Now we’re going to go to the next. So this one is one type of exit ticket: the single question exit ticket, and we can then draw on that to create the second exit ticket.

2. Mini-Pop Quiz for Review

So prompt number two. Now if you’re going to use this one fresh out of the box, nothing before, well then obviously you need all of your context again: ninth grade class or whatever the case is for you and what do you want? So here we’re actually going to create two very just quick spot checks of students.

Prompt

In my 9th grade class, students are studying how ancient Greeks used mythology to explain natural phenomena before scientific methods were introduced.

Please create an exit ticket for students that contains a single fill-in-the-blank question for students to answer and a single multiple choice question to gauge their level of understanding.

A single fill-in-the blank question and a single multiple choice question purpose to gauge their level of understanding.

Since I’m working in the same thread, I only need this part because all the context is already there. So let’s do it. All right, here we go.

Exit ticket one and two. Fill in the blank. “Ancient Greeks used blanks, myths of gods and goddesses.” (Of course, they weren’t myths to them, but we’ll let that pass. All right?) And a single multiple choice.

And now we’ve got a couple different exit tickets. We could have kids choose one. We could give them both, as a matter of fact. And frankly, it probably only takes about 12 seconds to for a kid to do this and answer.

And then you collect them. You see the degree to which the students got the right answers. And that then informs your next step in instructional programming.

All right. So that’s one and two. But let’s say neither one of these is really exciting to you. What else could we do? And we don’t want to do the same ones over and over and over again because, frankly, it gets boring. So let’s see what else is available.

And that brings us to number three.

3. A Toolkit of Exit Tickets

Now, if I am starting from scratch, I need to put that context back in there. But here I said we’re going to do it all in the same discussion thread. So now all we need is the task: set of five ready to use exit tickets for my lesson.

Prompt

Create a set of 5 ready-to-use exit tickets for my lesson on Greek mythology explaining natural phenomena. Each exit ticket should be a different type so I can rotate them over several days.

Each ticket should be a different type. So, I can rotate them. We don’t want five of the same. We want five different ones. And we could easily say 10 different ones depending on how long the instructional unit will last for you.

So, let’s go ahead and copy that. We’re going to drop it in the same discussion and see if we can get five different ones.

We’ve got a fill-in-the-blank multiple choice. We’ve seen those already. Short answer matching true/false. So there’s five.

Now let’s say one of the exit tickets you like is that true/false. I really like the true/false. So I will just say give me five more true/false questions. And now I can pick and choose the ones that I think are going to be most appropriate depending on what we’ve done during the day.

Conclusion

So there you go. Ways to use AI to help you to create exit tickets so you can actually understand what have the students gotten from the lesson and where do you go next.

I hope you found this technique useful. Take care.