An entry ticket is a practical and engaging tool for grabbing students’ attention right at the start of your live session. Entry tickets help students shift to the learner mindset and primes them for that day’s class through level-setting for the session, defining expectations for success, and using fun, low-stakes check-ins. They can build community and create a sense of belonging, a vital component for fostering motivation, by creating space for students to share ideas, questions, and insights, which can then be used to fuel the live session (Koblic, 2020).
One of the great things about entry tickets is that they can be super easy to implement in your digital classroom. You can switch it up, create some variety, or even set the expectation that at the beginning of class students should always do an entry ticket in one given way. And, worst case scenario, you can implement an entry ticket at the beginning of class that was not even planned out. We won’t tell. And your students will nonetheless benefit from it greatly.
You have a number of simple ways in which your students can express their ideas: the Zoom chat feature, the Zoom whiteboard feature, a premade Google Form, an online polling site (such as www.polleverywhere.com), or even having your students write something down on a piece of paper they have at their desk. While it can be beneficial for you to see your students’ responses, it is not necessary.
Entry Ticket Examples
Starter Question:
- Post a question on the first slide of a slide deck, “What was the most difficult part of this week’s asynchronous material?”
- Share your slide deck.
- As students enter your live session, ask your students to respond to the question as a private chat to you, using the Zoom chat feature.
Doing this in a private chat allows students to be able to be honest without worrying about their peers seeing their response. It also allows you to respond to common themes around your students’ pain points. You can then conduct a feedback-catalyzed miniature review session, ensuring that your students are on solid footing moving into the live session.
One-word Recap:
- When your students have all entered the live session, share your whiteboard with them.
- Ask them to locate their annotation tools.
- Have them type one word that best represents their week’s field placement.
- Ask for volunteers or call upon a few students to explain why they chose their word, perhaps words which were shared more than once.
Put It In The Chat:
- Once all your students have entered into the live session, ask them to send a chat to ‘Everyone’ with the biggest pain point they are currently facing in their current project.
- Find some themes and have students help one another with their input.
Quick Poll:
- Using the Zoom polling feature, create a poll with the question, “Which of today’s topics are you most excited to learn more about?”
Entry tickets are often as simple as posing a question to your students at the start of a live session. However, you could also have your students complete a small task, from which you could derive meaning later in class. You can use an entry ticket to prompt students to:
- Draw upon prior knowledge and new insights gained from the asynchronous content
- Think about topics in that day’s live session
- Identify their key interests from that week
- Quickly assess understanding of important concepts from the asynchronous material
Brainstorm more about entry tickets with the 2U Faculty Engagement & Development team in a Coaching Session. Sign up for one anytime; we’d love to see you there!
Additional Resources:
- Koblic, R. (2020). Why we put all the feels into learning. 2U. https://2u.com/latest/why-we-put-all-feels-learning/
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