I like to have a daily agenda visible in the classroom for the students to be able to reference. During practicum, I had a white board that I would update daily and one of the things that I included was the exit slip question. For the last few minutes of class after clean up was done, I had the students sit down and answer the question of the day. There were three main types of questions.
The questions sometimes related to a new concept I’d introduced to see if I had been effective in communicating. It was usually pretty clear who understood and who didn’t from the answers I got back.
I also used questions that were more abstract in order to have students try to look at something from a new perspective. With these questions I told students that there were no correct answers, rather the questions were meant to give them the opportunity to think freely and make connections between literal and figurative interpretations, or draw on knowledge from outside of the art room to enrich their answers.
The last type were opinion questions meant to judge the mood of the class on a subject before we discussed it, or just to get to know students better.
The students sometimes complained about having to do one more thing at the end of class but ultimately they enjoyed it and my SA decided he would have to adopt it for the rest of the year so that he would have a chance to ask some questions of his own. To make it even better I think I would ask for a minimum word count of 10 words to counter the two students who made it their mission to answer in one scrawled word each day. I would also give the students more opportunities to ask me questions. Maybe each day they could take turns to think of a question to ask me to balance out the flow of information?
