Summary for Educators

Article: “Let’s STOP and THINK about Those Exit Tickets” Author: Karin Hess
Publication: MiddleWeb, November 4, 2025

In her MiddleWeb article, Karin Hess challenges educators to rethink the traditional exit ticket, arguing that its common end-of-lesson use is far too limited to support deep, lasting learning. Instead, she proposes reframing exit tickets as STOP and THINK activities that occur at strategic points throughout a lesson, providing students with structured cognitive pauses that strengthen retention, metacognition, and conceptual understanding.

Hess begins by noting that exit tickets have long served two broad purposes: allowing students to reflect on what they learned, and enabling teachers to gauge what content “stuck.” While these functions are valuable, their typical placement at the very end of a lesson dramatically reduces their effectiveness. Cognitive science shows that the human brain can hold only three to five pieces of information in working memory at a time. When new content continues to accumulate without opportunities to process it, earlier ideas get pushed out or lost. As a result, end-of-class exit responses may reflect only the most recent material, not the full learning experience.

To counter this, Hess suggests rebranding exit tickets as STOP and THINK activities—brief, intentional pauses woven into instruction every 10–15 minutes. These pauses allow students to consolidate information, make connections, and offload ideas from working memory into longer-term schemas. Teachers across grade levels, she argues, should view these moments not as interruptions but as powerful tools for strengthening comprehension and reducing cognitive overload.

STOP and THINK activities can be used flexibly by individuals, pairs, or small groups. Hess emphasizes the added value of partner or group dialogue, which stimulates deeper thinking and supports collaborative meaning-making. When students verbalize ideas, question each other, and clarify misconceptions, they strengthen both conceptual understanding and academic language skills.

Unlike traditional exit tickets, STOP and THINK tasks serve multiple formative purposes before, during, and after a lesson. Hess offers several examples:

• Pre-lesson warm-ups such as predicting content or setting learning goals

• During-lesson reflections on new vocabulary, emerging questions, or surprising ideas

• Peer interviews where students identify what was most important or personally meaningful

• Error analysis tasks, modeled after the well-known “My Favorite No” strategy

These activities can also support reading comprehension by prompting students to pause multiple times during a text to check predictions, clarify ideas, or reconsider earlier interpretations.

One of Hess’s most practical recommendations is the use of a STOP and THINK Choice Board, a set of nine short tasks that students complete in pairs or groups. The teacher may assign a task or allow students to choose one. These options encourage analysis, connection-making, and creative representation—such as building timelines, generating examples and non-examples, or summarizing the essential meaning of a concept.

Throughout the article, Hess underscores that the ultimate goal of STOP and THINK is to foster deeper student understanding, not simply to gather teacher data. When reflection, collaboration, and metacognition occur continuously throughout the learning process, students become more thoughtful, independent, and aware of their own thinking. By shifting away from end-of-lesson exit cards toward embedded cognitive breaks, teachers create richer opportunities for sense-making that align with how the brain learns best.

Hess concludes by reminding educators that student learning thrives when teachers intentionally design routines that promote critical thinking, self-assessment, and collaborative processing. STOP and THINK activities offer a simple yet transformative way to elevate everyday lessons into experiences that genuinely deepen understanding.

Original Article

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Prepared with the assistance of AI software

OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT (4) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com