Exit Ticket Experiment: One Lesson I Hope I Learned

This reflective paper examines a four-year experiment with exit tickets in a lowstakes English class at a Japanese university. The students are pursuing licensure in fields unrelated to English and only need to complete the course, not master its content. Despite this context, I refined exit tickets semester after semester, grounding them in formative assessment research and aligning them with curriculum goals. When I finally discontinued them, no one noticed. This paper traces the arc from implementation through refinement to removal, analyzing what the absence revealed: that I had been optimizing for my own professional values rather than for the learners in front of me. Drawing on Schön's distinction between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, I argue that sustained attention to real-time classroom signals matters as much as between-semester revision. The paper concludes with three practical suggestions for teachers inclined toward similar experiments: attend to sustainability, read your context honestly, and find simple ways to record real-time results and reactions. This is not an argument against experimentation. It is an argument for noticing when an experiment has stopped serving anyone but yourself.