Learning Contracts - Process: 10 Helpful Hints

10 Helpful Hints

Here are some suggestions that may help your learning contracts be successful.

Make sure your objectives are specific enough that you can assess and evaluate student learning, but broad enough that they can be adapted for each student's contract.
You may want to start everyone on the same contract and then make individual changes as students work through the contract.
Sometimes it helps to provide students with resources to help with time limit. However, this depends on your learning objectives.
When individualizing student contracts, sometimes it is helpful to match up students of similar ability or interest to create peer collaboration and save you time and work.
Give short mini-lessons throughout the project or unit only to students who need them. In some cases this may require the whole class. This will help students to stay focused and take responsibility for what they need to learn and those who already know the concepts not get bored.
Make the layout of your contracts easy to follow and understand. Spreadsheets and checklists are an effective way of writing them up. You may want to save them as a template so you can create other contracts from them.
Use students who understand certain concepts to teach others who don't. This allows them to become experts and frees up your time to see more students or work with other students longer.
In some contracts you may not to allow for peer collaboration so the work is not always so individualized. Students like to discuss or ask questions about what they are learning.
For students who always seem to be ahead of you, allow them to design their own contracts, so they are taking ownership of their own learning.
Have parents develop a contract with their child or have a space for a parent signature so ownership is beyond the school environment.

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Best Practices: Pieces of the Puzzle