"The contract system was very successful because not only does it make students more responsible, but it gives them the option to do what they need to do in order to be successful.  Since the contract system gives you options on what work you do, busy work is eliminated.  All of the work you complete should be useful if you are honest with yourself."    —  Jared R., student

Contracts promote self-directedness

They provide students with choice and responsibility in steering their own learning process.  For many students, the experience of school is one of relentless, enforced passivity. Learning contracts replace that experience with a structure that nurtures self-directedness and engagement.  This boosts motivation and class cohesiveness and is a powerful force in creating an effective learning environment.

Long-held and counterproductive habits of doing school are replaced with self-directed learning.  When students begin to see themselves as capable, trustworthy people, it can have a powerful effect on them academically and personally.  It helps them to better learn the skill of learning.

Contracts can significantly reduce busywork and boredom

If a student is given adequate feedback, she will know when she has mastered the current material.  She can then move on to work that is more challenging. Sometimes, however, a student will instead choose to do work that is repetitious or too easy for her because it requires less effort and doesn’t hurt her grade.  This is particularly true of students who are still in the thrall of doing school.

If a student chooses instead to do busywork, the teacher will quickly become aware of it.  For instance, if a student is doing well on assessments but is continuing to do remedial work, this will call for a teacher-student conversation about whether she is choosing to be bored.  It’s no longer possible to for her to blame the teacher - she has made a bad choice, no more and no less. Conversations like these can often be pivotal in helping a student challenge the habit of doing school and become more self-directed.

Discovering that busywork is no longer required undoes a common source of student resentment.  Furthermore, when a student learns how to find the right level of challenge and pursue her learning at that level, she becomes a more effective learner.

Contracts provide a mechanism for accommodating different modes of learning

Contracts can include any differentiated items the teacher chooses.  For instance, a single learning goal can be addressed through items that are visual, auditory, and tactile-kinesthetic in nature.  As students become more aware of their own learning styles, they will become more adept at making good choices about how they learn.

Contracts provide a practical structure for formative assessments

Following a quiz or test, a contract can allow each student to do the specific remediation work that she needs.  The quiz or test itself becomes the feedback that drives her choices on the learning contract.

Contracts can be adapted to many situations in a wide range of disciplines

Learning contracts are flexible tools: they can be designed to serve virtually any academic function.  Contracts can organize conceptual learning found in the humanities, as well as skills-based learning found in mathematics and science.  Similarly, contracts can be adapted to the particular attributes of any group of students. For instance, if a class has immature, less self-directed students, a contract can be designed with more required items and fewer, more narrowly-defined differentiated items.  As students become more independent and responsible, more differentiated choices can easily be added.

Contracts give teachers more freedom to work with individuals or small groups of students

Contracts allow for open work time in which students are working independently on different items.  As students become more self-directed, open work time provides much-needed opportunities for the teacher to work with students on a smaller scale and respond to their needs more effectively than when working with the whole class.  Interactions can range from conversations with individual students to ad hoc workshops with small groups of students who are all struggling with a particular issue.

Open work time reveals much more of the motivations—and successes and failures—of students than can be discerned in a traditional whole-class setting.  A student who is disengaged and unmotivated becomes easier to identify, and a desynchronized classroom gives the teacher the freedom to discuss the situation with the student immediately.

Contracts encourage greater creativity in teachers

In a traditional classroom, all the students typically do the same thing at the same time, and the range of ways in which teachers can create new materials is limited.  There aren’t many opportunities to develop work that will challenge the brightest students in the room or provide enough remedial work to support the slowest students. The differentiation offered by contracts, however, encourages teachers to become more responsive to the needs of all students.  Teachers have more freedom to create a range of curriculum, activities, homework, research projects, and independent work to positively shape the experiences of students who might otherwise be bored or overwhelmed.

Contracts reinforce a growth mindset

All too many students are trapped in a fixed mindset, assuming that if they do badly on a test, for instance, it is because they are not good students and there is nothing that can be done.  Contracts, however, are designed to allow individual students to learn from their mistakes and choose a path towards mastery. This actively reinforces the idea that learning comes from effective effort.  In other words, contracts train students to adopt a growth mindset, to be less risk-averse, and to accept the notion that learning is a process that requires making mistakes and learning from them.