The increased scope of a unit contract provides a number of significant benefits beyond those for smaller learning contracts, as described in the previous chapter.  Here are some of the advantages in using contracts at this level:

Unit contracts provide a consistent structure for learning

Consistency helps students to feel comfortable with the learning process.  It provides a stable structure within which they can have freedom to steer their learning.  When a student comes to trust the regularity of the patterns created in contracts, it provides a scaffolding that allows him to grow into his role as a responsible, proactive agent in the classroom.

Unit contracts teach students to manage time

Within the structure of unit contracts, students are repeatedly required to choose not only what they do but when they do it.  For many students, teachers have determined the deadline for every piece of work they have done, and they have little or no experience managing their own time.  Training them in this skill is an overt goal of contracts, one which is continuously reinforced. Good time management is an essential aspect of self-directedness, and is, of course, useful in life outside of school.

Unit contracts provide a practical structure for remediation

Since a contract desynchronizes the learning process, it allows individual students to continue working on material from a previous unit that they have not yet mastered.  If a student did badly on a unit test, for instance, the questions she got wrong can serve as feedback about what she needs to continue practicing. The next contract can be designed to allow that work to continue, even as the class moves on to the next topic.  By making such review work as valuable as activities in the current unit, contracts provide a way of giving a student “credit” for doing remediation.

Unit contracts provide complete documentation for the entire learning process

Unit contracts list all the possible work a student can do.  Since every student can complete a different subset of that list, contracts must include a mechanism to record which items were accomplished.  This provides a detailed record of all the work done within each unit.

Unit contracts can simplify a teacher’s bookkeeping

Differentiated learning can, of course, complicate a teacher’s grade book.  However, contracts provide a concise way to assess and record the learning process.  Because students record what work they did on the contract as well as how it was evaluated, the teacher is freed from having to record every piece of work in her grade book.  Instead, she can summarize and enter a single grade for the whole contract, dramatically simplifying bookkeeping.  Having students take responsibility for documenting  their own learning process also provides them with a greater sense of ownership.

Unit contracts give teachers a means of organizing the learning goals for an entire course

By working backwards from the overarching goals of the course, a teacher (or better still, a group of teachers), can prioritize the most important learning goals and organize them into units.  The basic scope of every unit contract is created through this process.

Unit contracts provide teacher and student an overview of the learning process and a tool for authentic assessment

A collection of contracts at the end of a marking period gives a clear overview of a student’s work.  This can be invaluable in critiquing how well she is doing and how she might improve. In particular, unit contracts can be one of the central mechanisms used in grade conferences or other discussions with students about how well they are learning.  A sequence of unit contracts offers both student and teacher a long-term perspective on the student’s progress that might otherwise be hard to grasp.

Contracts can be used to teach students self-evaluation

Self-assessment is an essential aspect of self-directed learning.  It is important for a student to evaluate the contract items she has completed, as well as determining what she thinks is a fair grade for the whole contract.  Any differences that may arise between a student’s and teacher’s assessment can lead to important conversations about what excellence looks like. This is particularly true at the start of the year.  A well-designed contract supports self-evaluation, and self-evaluation gives students ownership over the learning process. The advantages of self-evaluation are described more fully in “Grades Reconsidered ".

Unit contracts can help transform the grading process into an exercise in metacognition

When students learn to evaluate their own work, teachers can observe how honest and accurate they are being and can give them feedback accordingly.  This provides a window into a broader understanding of how well they are steering their learning process. In addition, the contract gives an overview of not just how well a student did her work, but also how well she decided what work to do.  This can provide another opportunity to reflect on and cultivate the student’s decision-making skills.

The creation of unit contracts can serve as a basis for collaboration with colleagues  

Clarifying and prioritizing learning goals, creating meaningful categories for contract work, and sharing and sorting contract items with others is more productive than doing it alone, particularly among teachers who are teaching the same course.  Designing contracts is also an excellent task for a professional learning community (PLC).

Unit contracts can help liberate the curriculum from the structure and the content of textbook chapters

All too often, the syllabus of a course is aligned, or even identical, to the table of contents of the textbook.  Chapters become units, and, because there are always more chapters in a textbook than can be feasibly covered in a school year, the linkage between curriculum and texts adds pressure to expand the content that must be “covered”.  Academic rigor can be defined as the pace at which the class marches through the chapters—the more rigorous, the faster. Unfortunately, this pressure only exacerbates the already ubiquitous problem of the bell curve and students at the bottom being left behind.  

Using unit contracts helps teachers regain control over the definition of essential learning goals.  It also frees up the more successful students to explore further, possibly even beyond what is in the textbook.  There will be any number of directions students can pursue, such as diving into more sophisticated work or investigating areas of interest that are not covered in the textbook.