You can visit my Diagnostic Questions website here.
More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now like many teachers out there i love an exit ticket if you’re not familiar with exit tickets the way they work is normally the last five minutes of the lesson you give out a slip of paper on each child’s desk with a question or a couple of questions on it the students fill them out and they hand them to you on their way out of the door and then you have a quick flick through them you get a sense of where your students are at in terms of their current understanding of an idea and then you can respond accordingly the next lesson exit tickets are great but what i’m going to suggest in this video is that they can be improved by using diagnostic questions now i love a diagnostic question here’s an example of one here it’s a multiple choice question with one correct answer and three wrong answers but crucially each of the wrong answers reveals a specific misconception so here are four reasons why i think diagnostic questions make really good exit tickets the first is there’s no printing you can simply project up this diagnostic question and the students can vote so no need to mess around with their photocopiers scissors handing things out or anything like that a big time saver secondly they give you an immediate snapshot of students understanding so the way i run diagnostic questions is you project the question up on the board and then you give the students thinking time and then say three two one show me your answers now if students vote using mini whiteboards or abcd cards immediately you get that feedback from your students in terms of their understanding you don’t have that annoying time lag where you’ve got to wait for the exit tickets to be handed in then you’ve got to find time to flick through them and so on you get that snapshot straight away and that leads into the final two reasons so the third reason is that you can diagnose the specific nature of any of your students misunderstandings so let’s imagine that you ask this question and there isn’t a consensus you’ve got some students here who think it’s one thing and some students who think it’s another well based on their responses you can get a good sense of why the students are struggling and you can respond accordingly and immediately in the lesson again without this time lag of having to pick it up at the start of the next lesson and finally i think this might be my favorite you know there’s a real good opportunity for stretch and challenge so let’s imagine you asked the diagnostic question and there is a consensus the vast majority of students think the same and it happens to be the correct answer well you’ve got a few minutes left so what are you going to do about it well you could set them one of my favorite challenges and that is write me three questions that would make each of the wrong answers right so you’ve got your diagnostic question there we’ve established that the correct answer in this case is c so the challenge for the final few minutes of the lesson is how would you change this question and i often like to say to the students keep the question as close to the original as possible so can you change one thing so the correct answer is no longer c but it’s a can you change one thing from this diagram so the correct answer is now b can you change one thing so the correct answer is d a really nice challenge so for those four reasons that’s why i think diagnostic questions make really really really good exit tickets and if you’re looking for a free collection of diagnostic questions for all topics you can visit my diagnosticquestions.com website so what do you think is that tip any good how might you use it let me know in the comments either on the blog post or on the youtube page i’d be super grateful if you could like the video and subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel and you can visit tipsforteachers.co.uk for more tips like this thanks so much for watching
