Ask Marian

How often should I use exit tickets?

Transcript

More and more teachers are using what we call exit tickets—those are little slips of paper usually where kids are given a question and they respond to that question [and] it’s very simple and not lengthy. At the end of the class, the teacher collects those exit tickets to get a feel for what students learned, what they got out of the lesson. Different teachers have wonderings about how often they should do that, so a teacher did ask how often I would use an exit ticket.

I think that I might use it particularly on a day where a new concept had been addressed and I want to see if kids are getting out of it what I was hoping they would. I might probably make sure I used an exit ticket at least a couple times a week, although some teachers might prefer once a week, to take a pulse of my students and see where they’re at and how they’re doing, because maybe I didn’t hear from all of them during a class and want to get a feel from other kids about what they were thinking.

But I do know teachers who are totally happy using exit tickets every single day. It’s not a lengthy question, kids get used to it, it’s part of the structure, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that as well. I think if I did an exit ticket every day, I might vary the structure a little bit, and maybe sometimes they would be doing maybe a computation, but other times they might be addressing something that I said that they thought was really interesting. I would just kind of vary the tempo of what the exit ticket talked about.

How do I convince students that I really care more about their strategies than their answers?

The easiest way to accomplish this, although I know it might be hard for some teachers, is to not ask for the answer. You can do this in different ways. For example, you might just give students the answer, and their only job is to figure out how to arrive at that answer. Or you might stop the work period before students have gotten to the answer and ask about what they were thinking and doing.

What are your thoughts on the cyclical teaching of math concepts?

We have lots of evidence to support the notion that if we keep ideas fresh, they become easier to retrieve. It’s hard to recall something you haven’t thought about for a long time. So cycling, which is also called spiralling, makes sense. However, you still have to decide which ideas are important enough to cycle since there probably isn’t time to cycle everything. For me, what is worth cycling are the essential understandings in math. We want those essential understandings to come up multiple times a year.

But there might be other specific ideas, too, that students will need again in order to make sense of something new they are going to meet. You have to look hard at the curriculum to decide what those are for your grade level. These might include things, such as representing or comparing numbers or facts, which are very likely to come up in many situations. There might also be ideas in geometry, measurement, data, coding, financial literacy, or algebra that students need to meet frequently so that these ideas can be easily recalled when they are needed.

How can I use questions that might be difficult to read for students with limited language skills?

Teachers often tell me that they like some of the questions I propose, but that their students have limited language skills, and so the teachers cannot use these questions.

I do understand their concerns, but I feel it is critical to find a way around this. It is important not to abandon using questions that promote thinking and understanding in place of questions that have straightforward calculations with no words.

Often, we can use visuals and gestures to get around the problem. Consider this question: I multiply two numbers, and the answer has a tens digit of 2. What numbers could I have multiplied?

To simplify this, you could write something like this:

_____ × _____ = []2[] OR 2[]

What are some strategies for teaching the division of fractions?

There are two main ideas involved in teaching the division of fractions.
One is that a ÷ b means how many b’s fit in a. So, 1/2 ÷ 1/4 means how many 1/4s are in 1/2. This might be simplified by thinking of 1/2 as 2/4, and so there are clearly two 1/4s in 2/4.

The other idea is what I call “unit rate.” In a ÷ b, b can be thought of as a unit of time. If you can do amount a in b units of time, we can think of a ÷ b as how much a you can do in one unit of time.

For example, 1/3 ÷ 1/2 means you can do 1/3 of a task in half an hour. How much can you do in an hour? This leads to the notion that a/b ÷ c/d = a/b × d/c.

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Why do my students prefer procedural questions over understanding questions?

Transcript
I was talking to a group of teachers recently, and one of them said to me that when she, in her Grade 2 class with seven-year-olds, uses what I often call understanding questions or conceptual questions, as opposed to more procedural questions, the kids are not happy. They just want the kind of question like, “What is 5 + 2?” And so she said, “Why is that? Are my kids like other kids? What can I do about it?” and so on. And I think that’s a very important kind of question that she asked.

A lot of what students say in response to a question or how they react has to do with what they’re used to. So, if students are used to questions where you’re really just finding out if they already know something, and so often the response is quite quick, they might start to believe those are the normal math questions, and that’s what they’re supposed to do. And then when you ask a question that’s not that kind, it feels off and they’re reluctant to respond.

So, I think part of what we can do as teachers is to do a better balance of questions and just quickly assess what a student already knows and questions where we really expect them to stop for a while and think for a while and then respond. When those second kind of questions become more, I’m going to call it “normal” to kids, I think they’re going to be more willing to respond. I think often kids are not willing if the questions don’t feel what I would call “normal” to them.

Why do my students prefer procedural questions over understanding questions?

Transcript
I was talking to a group of teachers recently, and one of them said to me that when she, in her Grade 2 class with seven-year-olds, uses what I often call understanding questions or conceptual questions, as opposed to more procedural questions, the kids are not happy. They just want the kind of question like, “What is 5 + 2?” And so she said, “Why is that? Are my kids like other kids? What can I do about it?” and so on. And I think that’s a very important kind of question that she asked.

A lot of what students say in response to a question or how they react has to do with what they’re used to. So, if students are used to questions where you’re really just finding out if they already know something, and so often the response is quite quick, they might start to believe those are the normal math questions, and that’s what they’re supposed to do. And then when you ask a question that’s not that kind, it feels off and they’re reluctant to respond.

So, I think part of what we can do as teachers is to do a better balance of questions and just quickly assess what a student already knows and questions where we really expect them to stop for a while and think for a while and then respond. When those second kind of questions become more, I’m going to call it “normal” to kids, I think they’re going to be more willing to respond. I think often kids are not willing if the questions don’t feel what I would call “normal” to them.

Why do my students prefer procedural questions over understanding questions?

Transcript
I was talking to a group of teachers recently, and one of them said to me that when she, in her Grade 2 class with seven-year-olds, uses what I often call understanding questions or conceptual questions, as opposed to more procedural questions, the kids are not happy. They just want the kind of question like, “What is 5 + 2?” And so she said, “Why is that? Are my kids like other kids? What can I do about it?” and so on. And I think that’s a very important kind of question that she asked.

A lot of what students say in response to a question or how they react has to do with what they’re used to. So, if students are used to questions where you’re really just finding out if they already know something, and so often the response is quite quick, they might start to believe those are the normal math questions, and that’s what they’re supposed to do. And then when you ask a question that’s not that kind, it feels off and they’re reluctant to respond.

So, I think part of what we can do as teachers is to do a better balance of questions and just quickly assess what a student already knows and questions where we really expect them to stop for a while and think for a while and then respond. When those second kind of questions become more, I’m going to call it “normal” to kids, I think they’re going to be more willing to respond. I think often kids are not willing if the questions don’t feel what I would call “normal” to them.

Why do my students prefer procedural questions over understanding questions?

Transcript
I was talking to a group of teachers recently, and one of them said to me that when she, in her Grade 2 class with seven-year-olds, uses what I often call understanding questions or conceptual questions, as opposed to more procedural questions, the kids are not happy. They just want the kind of question like, “What is 5 + 2?” And so she said, “Why is that? Are my kids like other kids? What can I do about it?” and so on. And I think that’s a very important kind of question that she asked.

A lot of what students say in response to a question or how they react has to do with what they’re used to. So, if students are used to questions where you’re really just finding out if they already know something, and so often the response is quite quick, they might start to believe those are the normal math questions, and that’s what they’re supposed to do. And then when you ask a question that’s not that kind, it feels off and they’re reluctant to respond.

So, I think part of what we can do as teachers is to do a better balance of questions and just quickly assess what a student already knows and questions where we really expect them to stop for a while and think for a while and then respond. When those second kind of questions become more, I’m going to call it “normal” to kids, I think they’re going to be more willing to respond. I think often kids are not willing if the questions don’t feel what I would call “normal” to them.

Why do my students prefer procedural questions over understanding questions?

Transcript
I was talking to a group of teachers recently, and one of them said to me that when she, in her Grade 2 class with seven-year-olds, uses what I often call understanding questions or conceptual questions, as opposed to more procedural questions, the kids are not happy. They just want the kind of question like, “What is 5 + 2?” And so she said, “Why is that? Are my kids like other kids? What can I do about it?” and so on. And I think that’s a very important kind of question that she asked.

A lot of what students say in response to a question or how they react has to do with what they’re used to. So, if students are used to questions where you’re really just finding out if they already know something, and so often the response is quite quick, they might start to believe those are the normal math questions, and that’s what they’re supposed to do. And then when you ask a question that’s not that kind, it feels off and they’re reluctant to respond.

So, I think part of what we can do as teachers is to do a better balance of questions and just quickly assess what a student already knows and questions where we really expect them to stop for a while and think for a while and then respond. When those second kind of questions become more, I’m going to call it “normal” to kids, I think they’re going to be more willing to respond. I think often kids are not willing if the questions don’t feel what I would call “normal” to them.