Be flexible

Including blank places on a contract allows for the addition of new items in response to students’ needs.  For example, you may discover that the jump from the skill level of one contract item to the next is too big, and that there’s an interim step needed.  Discussions with students about the specific areas they are struggling with are essential in creating new contract items that will be responsive to their needs.  It also reminds students that they are active participants in the learning process. This can have a powerful effect on the working relationship they have with each other and with you.

When a sense of community and trust is well established, individual students with a  specific problem area will be comfortable asking for more work in that area. Similarly, when an student comes up with a related topic that he is interested in, he should be able to add independent exploratory works of his own invention, provided he has already mastered the contract learning goals and discusses it with the teacher first.

Listen

Assume that your contracts will evolve over years of use.  It will take a number of iterations of using a given contract before it will be truly effective for the whole range of students.  Continually improving contracts requires the active participation of your students. Therefore, encourage them to give you feedback on how well they are being served by your contracts.  Has some of the work become busywork? Have they had enough opportunities to practice? Are they bored? Has there been sufficient opportunity to do the remediation from the last test, when needed?  

It is important that your students know that you are designing and redesigning the contract to respond to their needs.  It will change, sometimes on the fly, to make their learning process more effective. In my experience, students are more willing participants in improving the contracts (and the course in general) when they also know they are helping improve the course for future classes.

Be ready to adjust the pace

By checking for understanding on a regular basis, you will know whether your planning contract was an accurate prediction of how long the process would take.  The criterion for the pace must be the successful mastery of the material by a broad range of students. If a few students are struggling, the flexibility of the differentiated items allows them to continue practicing while the class proceeds.  If, on the other hand, a wide range of students are struggling, the pace is by definition too fast. When that occurs, it is time to back up, find out where the problems began and get the class back on track. Responding in this way is a powerful signal to the students that their comprehension, not the “covering” of the curriculum, is the goal.

Revise the scope of the contract if necessary

When it becomes clear that some aspects of the learning goals have not been widely mastered by the planned end of the unit, an adjustment must be made.  The calendar can be adjusted, as described above. If that isn’t practical, the learning goals and/or the number of required items on the contract can be modified.  If the problem areas are essential learning goals and it isn’t possible to extend the contract due, say, to external constraints on scheduling, some other arrangement is needed to revisit the topic.  Possibilities include a follow-up mini-contract or an added section of the next contract.

Making these kinds of adjustments requires paying close attention to the readiness of the majority of students finish the contract and to take a test.  Clearly, it also requires trusting your students to give you honest feedback.