Define the learning goals first
Building a contract from the ground up offers an opportunity to examine every aspect of the unit you are about to teach. As always, start the design with this question: “What should students know and be able to do when this contract is completed?”
Carefully answering this question will force you to be clear and explicit about your curricular priorities. Once that task is done, plan backwards to create the contents and structure of the contract.
It is important to remember that there is no right way to design a contract; learning goals can be expressed and organized in any appropriate format. Different disciplines will certainly have unique requirements that will lead to a variety of ways to articulate the learning goals. Regardless of what you teach, the task of categorizing and articulating the learning goals is an important exercise and leads to clarity for you and for your students.
Define the required work items
When you consider the entire list of possible activities, the required items are those which directly lead to understanding the learning goals. There should be no redundancy between any of the required items—if a student can master the learning goal by doing a single required work, she should not be required to do that work again. In other words, the criterion of required work is that it will be sufficient for the most adept and quickest learners in your room to master the learning goals without any of it feeling like busywork.
For complex skills, determine the basic building blocks and the number of steps in the learning process
One of the most challenging aspects of creating contracts is determining how to create the scaffolding that your students will need to master complex skills. The appropriate number of steps will depend on the complexity of the skill being learned and the abilities of the particular group of students in your classroom. The more highly motivated and prepared the students are, the fewer the number of steps. Each major level of complexity needs at least one contract item to allow for practice as needed.
Breaking skills down to the appropriate number of subskills serves a number of important functions. First, it allows every student to be successful in each step before moving on, thus building on a sense of self-confidence. Second, it allows students to identify what part or parts that they find difficult in particular, so that they can practice those parts specifically. This trains them in the metacognitive skill of isolating the difficulty. Finally, it affords your students (and you) a sense of clarity about how complex skills are constructed.
Determine the level of critical thinking to be mastered
An important metacognitive learning goal for every student is the cultivation of critical thinking skills and creativity. In the scaffolding of complex skills, this may well be considered as a final step. Confronting students with unexpected challenges different from those they previously encountered can be one means of practicing creative thinking skills. This level of creative problem solving may be considered essential for every student and explicitly built into the learning goals. In some circumstances, it may also be considered an enrichment activity for students who master the essential skills quickly. In any case, this important aspect should be intentionally addressed.
Create both formal and informal assessments for each level of complexity
Both your students and you need feedback on how successfully they are mastering each step. For the student, this is essential in learning how to accurately assess whether he needs more practice. This self-awareness is at the heart of effective learning. For you, these regular check-ups are essential in deciding whether to continue to review the material or move on to the next topic. See “The Uses of Feedback” in "Learning Contracts: The Structure of Self-directedness".
Design the differentiated contract items that will allow students to continue reviewing concepts and practicing skills as needed
A student may need to continue working on a learning goal under at least three distinct situations. First, if a student has completed a required contract item and still hasn’t mastered the content, there must be other contract items designed for remediation. Creating these items requires anticipating where students will have the most difficulty and creating contract items that will allow them to practice as needed. The energy contract allows for a review of the set-up problems and two opportunities to practice the most complex level of problem solving. Several other differentiated items are useful for reviewing the concepts and are described in detail below.
A second scenario where a student may need to continue working is when he didn’t do well on an assessment at the end of the previous unit. As an example, on the energy contract, the Work Retest Problem Set is designed to practice the skills from the previous contract. If the unit assessment is formative in nature—highly recommended—it is essential to also offer differentiated work that lets him continue reviewing that material. That work is an integral part of the test remediation process, which is described in more detail in “Testing Revisited”.
A third scenario occurs when a student is struggling with fundamental skill that is a prerequisite to success in the current contract. On the energy contract, for instance, the Algebra Review Problems item is designed to let students practice the basic mathematical skill of rearranging equations using the formulas found in this unit. All too often, a student resigns himself to failure because such fundamental weaknesses remain unexamined and unchallenged. Acknowledging and addressing the problem, rather than ignoring it and moving on, grounds his learning experience and provides the means for greater success.
Choose contract items for enrichment.
Assume that some students will achieve mastery before others and will therefore be capable of tackling more complex problems. It is important to provide these students with differentiated contract items that are more sophisticated and challenging than anything that you will hold them accountable for at the end of the unit. If appropriate, a second, more sophisticated textbook can be issued as needed to provide the appropriate level of challenge.
Choose differentiated work to accommodate different learning styles.
Since students learn in different modes, they need to be able to choose work in those various styles whenever possible. The energy contract, for instance, includes hands-on activities, paper and pencil problem solving, working with computer simulations, reading and taking notes, watching demonstrations, working on graphical organizers like concept maps, and discussing the material being learned in small groups. Thus, whether a student is a dominantly visual, auditory or tactile-kinesthetic learner, there will be activities that will work well for him.
Organize contract items into categories
Constructing a contract is an opportunity to create useful categories of work that are responsive to both student’s needs and the nature of the subject being taught. The act of creating those categories can be surprisingly challenging. Being clear about how work is organized in a contract, however, is a powerful tool in presenting it to students.
Some examples of such categories include:
Essential (required) work can be separated from remediation and enrichment. In my contract described above, these categories were distinguished by the use of bold vs plain text.
Hands-on activities can be separated from readings or worksheets or problem sets. In my contact, these were two separate lists.
Items can be grouped around the learning goals or subtopics.
Work can be organized along learning styles. Teachers may consider and include options for visual, auditory, tactile-kinesthetic, or inductive/deductive learning styles, for example.
Categories of work may be unique to a given discipline. For instance, in a foreign language, categories might include speaking/listening, writing/reading, fluency/grammar/vocabulary, and so forth.
Conceptual learning goals can be separate from skills-based goals.
Groups of contract items can be organized around the calendar, having items grouped within partial deadlines. This approach is especially useful for students who are not yet adept at time management.
If the topic can be broken into relatively independent segments, the contract items can be organized accordingly, with each segment followed by a quiz or other assessment.
Contract groupings can be organized by who is doing the work. Work done by individual students might form one group, work done by study groups another.
Groups may be designed around where the work is being done—one group for work inside the classroom, one in the language lab or a resource center, and one at home.
Groupings may also be useful in steering how students do differentiated work. For instance, a contract might require a student to do three items out of one group, five out of another.
Decide on a minimum number of items to be completed
This will be the sum of the required and differentiated items. This number is determined by the scope of the learning goals, the number of items deemed essential in mastering them, and the anticipated amount of remediation needed by struggling students.
A factor determining the minimum number of items is the readiness of students to work independently. For classes with more mature and self-directed students, the number of differentiated items will be greater. Even in a class that is initially less responsible, as the year progresses, contracts can respond to students’ growing self-sufficiency by having fewer required items and more differentiated items. When students realize their increasingly mature behavior has led to more freedom, there is a well-earned sense of pride.
Create a planning calendar
After deciding what activities will be in the contract, the pace at which the contract will unfold must be determined. A planning calendar allows you to design the sequence of activities and to estimate how long each activity will take. You will also need to decide how many of the contract items are to be done as homework and how many will be done in class.
The pace of a class is one of the central factors in ensuring broad success. Optimizing the pace is tricky, particularly if there is a wide range of abilities in your class. and it is often a difficult thing to predict. If at all possible, keep a record of what happens in class every day so that planning the following year will become much more realistic. This is hard to do—we are all too busy— but it is a huge help when you plan future contract calendars.
Decide the length of time needed for the contract
In my experience, the shortest contracts were about one week long, and that was generally because there was an external deadline for finishing up the contract, like an upcoming vacation or the end of the marking period. Under such circumstances, don’t distort the pace to meet the time constraint. Instead, it is better to break up a long contract into separate shorter pieces. For instance, the energy contract was scheduled to start one week before winter break. The unit, normally three weeks long, originally included a section on the concept of work. Given the timeframe, I created a separate work contract to be completed in that week and introduced the energy contract shown below after the winter break.
If there is less than a week available before an external interruption, it’s probably best to have students do work outside the contract structure. This might be a small project, independent research, review or other functions that can take a few days to accomplish.
There is also a limit on how long an effective contract can be. I have found that contracts longer than three weeks tend to lose coherency, and it becomes harder for students to see how the whole scope of material included in the contract holds together. As always, planning is best based on the needs of the learner.
Create a contract calendar
The contract calendar is how you communicate what parts of your planning calendar the students need to know. The calendar includes hard deadlines for all required homework or other work which is meant to be reviewed together in class. Once you have established what that work is and when it occurs in the planning calendar, transfer those deadlines and events to the contract calendar.
In general, avoid describing everyday activities on the contract calendar. Too much written information clutters the image, making the deadlines less noticeable. Filling every day with detailed plans also lends itself to the mentality that what we do in class is preordained and that nothing spontaneous can happen. Finally, sometimes progress through the contract is slower or faster than anticipated, particularly the first time you do it. When that happens, adjusting the calendar—“We are now officially two days behind”—is more complicated if it is cluttered with what is going to happen every day. Leaving some empty spaces on the contract calendar allows for more flexibility and spontaneity.
For longer cycles, interim deadlines can help the procrastinating student manage his time and avoid a pile-up of work at the end of the contract. This not only assists in his learning about time management, but also reinforces the need to prevent useful work from turning into busywork just to satisfy contract obligations. The message to the student is that if it isn’t about learning, don’t do it.
Designing the planning and contract calendars can be quite challenging, particularly if you are developing contracts for the first time. If time constraints or a lack of familiarity with new curriculum prevent you from planning out the whole unit in detail, hand out the contracts with an empty (or partially empty) calendar and have students fill it in as the unit unfolds. This is generally a better alternative than waiting until you have completely finished the planning calendar before handing out the contract.
While a calendar is not an absolutely essential part of a contract, it does serve the important purpose of clarifying the scope of the contract. Contract calendars also help students learn to manage their time.
Create a mechanism for student self-evaluation
In general, by the time a student hands in a contract, every item should be self-evaluated. In addition, he should decide on an overall grade for the whole contract.
Create a consistent nomenclature
In order to be concise, contracts need a form of shorthand that tells students exactly what the assignments are in an abbreviated form. Here’s an example from the energy contract:
HW 7A: Read 7.2-7.4 R11,14,19 E14,22,24,35,36 (Power, PE, KE, Conservation )
This stands for the first homework assignment in chapter 7 of the textbook, which requires reading and taking notes on sections 7.2 through 7.4. When the students are going over the homework in study groups, they will need to discuss and answer Review (R) questions 11, 14, and 19 and Exercises (E) questions 14, 22, 24, 35, and 36. (“Review” and “Exercises” are separate categories of questions at the end of the chapter in our textbook.)
Following every contract item is a brief description of its contents in parentheses and italics. Knowing what every contract item is about creates an overview of the material and helps students make good choices about what differentiated work they are going to do.
Create a coherent graphic design
When the design of a contract is clear and meaningful, students will find it easier to use and evaluate, and it will help them organize their own work. Creating a typographic pattern using font types and sizes, and bold, underlined and italic text can also help organize the different categories of contract items such as required vs. differentiated work, review vs. enriched, regular vs. honors credit, etc.
Leave space for comments
There is often a need for written communication between you and a student. It may be some specific circumstance that affected his work, or a reminder of some specific arrangement you made verbally. You may disagree with the student’s self-evaluation (particularly at the beginning of the year) and want to describe what the disagreement is about. You may also need to ask why a student made certain choices. At the end of the marking period, viewing these comments during a grade conference can provide specific topics for conversation and can be particularly helpful in discussing how the student can improve his performance.
Leave room for new items to be added
Learning new material may require additional review or practice for some students that you hadn’t anticipated. Being responsive to these needs may entail adding new items to the contract.