A Teaching Minute brings you teaching tips from the CTL
The Ticket Home
Friday, 2/06/2026
This semester, many of our Teaching Minutes focus on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at UVM. In these mailings, we’ll highlight a faculty member who presented at the SoTL Symposium—now hosted every spring by the CTL and sponsored by the Office of the Provost—to share their teaching experiments or innovations and what they’ve learned along the way. Topics will range from incremental teaching improvements to more formally researched teaching interventions.
At last year’s SoTL symposium, David Jangraw (Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering) presented a talk about a simple and yet impactful teaching strategy—The Ticket Home—which was inspired by his participation in a few inclusive teaching workshops. Its success in his own classes led him to encourage colleagues to try it out, and about 20 faculty in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences have since adopted it, too.
The Ticket Home is a brief online survey (in Microsoft Forms) that students complete in the final few minutes of class, responding to the following three prompts:
- What was the most confusing concept in today’s class?
- What is one thing you liked about today’s class?
- How could we make today’s class more effective?
Dave says that one of The Ticket Home’s primary benefits is that students develop greater metacognitive awareness. When they pause to reflect and write about what they’ve just learned or what may be confusing, it can help to deepen their understanding of both the course content and their own learning process.
At the same time, this immediate feedback allows Dave to see what is, and isn’t, working in his courses. This supports “just-in-time teaching,” which means making quick, responsive, and meaningful teaching adjustments to meet students’ needs. Instead of waiting until the end of the semester to learn what the class liked or disliked from course evaluations, The Ticket Home brings immediacy to the feedback loop—and, for both Dave and the students, that’s a game changer!
To make it as quick and easy as possible to get and use student feedback, CEMS hired a TA whose job it is to set up survey forms and then summarize the gathered feedback for each instructor who joins Dave’s “Ticket Home Team.”
Finally, at the end of the semester, Dave gives exit surveys about The Ticket Home practice. They've been strongly positive, with 100% of instructors and 61% of students agreeing last year that they’d like to use it in their other classes, too (with 6% of students disagreeing).
Learn More
If you’d like to learn more about The Ticket Home or explore other ways to collect formative feedback from students, we're holding a workshop, co-hosted by Dave Jangraw and Holly Parker. Same workshop, two different times:
“SoTL Sharing: Collecting Formative Feedback from Students”
As always, we look forward to connecting with you!
Center for Teaching & Learning
www.uvm.edu/ctl
ctl@uvm.edu