Exit Slips and Higher Level Thinking

By Mark Heintz

Higher level thinking in May? You bet! At the end of my lesson on Monday, students wrote four impacts of the Neolithic Revolution.  We did one as a class, then they attempted three in their groups. As an exit slip, students submitted what they thought was their best to an open ended essay question in Schoology.

As I read through them, I found that some students grasped the goal of the lesson and used the document as evidence, while others...needed more time. There was such a wide range of sentences submitted and some students did not submit.  As I was reading, I realized I wanted all students to see the range of writing.   Furthermore, I wanted students to evaluate the writing and rank it as either high, middle, and low quality.

I took student exemplars and I typed them in a note in Notability, then attached the note it to Schoology.  This enabled the students to simply drag or edit the statements.  

The students ranked the statements from high to low and it was great! The students saw student examples from the day before.  They ranked the statements simply by clicking on the statements and moving them to the top if they were the best and the bottom if they were the worst.  As a class we discussed the why they ranked them they way they did.  The students were providing great reasons and rationales for their rankings.  The students who did not submit their statement the previous day were exposed to different quality of statements.  The students received timely feedback that improved their writing.  At the end of the day, the students were asked to complete a similar task with the Second Agricultural Revolution and the statements were significantly stronger.