Empowering Students Through Learning Contracts

Empowering Students Through Learning Contracts

A learning contract is a written agreement between students and their teacher that outlines behavioral and learning goals, actions, and tasks the student pledges to perform to achieve academic success.

Use of learning contracts can empower students as they:

• Encourage students to reflect on their readiness to learn.
• Motivate students and facilitate self-directed learning.
• Enhance students’ sense of responsibility and ownership of learning.
• Help students to critique and apply learning tools and strategies and engage in positive learning behaviors to achieve their goals.
• Teach students life skills like goal setting and time management.

Components of a Strong Learning Contract

When building a learning contract, it is important to involve students to encourage them to actively invest their time and efforts in achieving goals. A learning contract should have the following components:

Acceptance and Commitment: The contract can start with a statement such as:

“I, (name of the student), pledge to perform the actions listed in this contract to improve my academic performance.”

At the end of the contract, the signatures of the student, teacher, and (in some cases) parents should be present to accept and commit to the terms.

Goals: Students and teachers can negotiate and set goals based on students’ learning readiness.

Student Responsibilities: The contract should contain all the behaviors and actions students will perform to attain their goals. Some of these targets can include:

• Compulsory attendance
• Active class participation
• Seeking assistance from teachers
• Consequences if terms are not met

Students should also fill out the following:

• Objectives: What tasks will be completed to advance learning?
• Resources: What strategies, tools and resources will be applied to complete tasks?
• Timelines: When will the tasks be completed?
• Evidence: How can teachers determine whether learning has occurred?
• Evaluation: How can teacher assess for learning?

Teacher Responsibilities: A strong learning contract also outlines the teacher’s input to support student learning, such as help after-hours, reviewing material, clarifying information, reminders or alerts for missing work

Inclusion of teachers’ responsibilities emphasizes the shared nature of the contract, encouraging students to approach teachers more freely for support and assistance.

When framing the contract, teachers can collaborate with the class as a whole and generate a basic outline of learning goals for all students to follow. Teachers can then meet with each student separately to cater to individual student needs and self-directed goals.

Learning contracts thereby help teachers to differentiate learning based on students’ abilities and readiness to learn. Simultaneously, contracts empower students by making them more responsible and strengthening their commitment to the learning process.

Like this article for teachers?

Browse the Professional Learning Board COURSE CATALOG to find related online courses for teachers in your state. Professional Learning Board is a leading provider of online professional development classes that teachers use to renew a teaching license or renew a teaching certificate.