A common theme running through many of our readings is student responsibility. Many of our authors cite this as a benefit of differentiated instruction. However, students do not magically develop responsibility because you differentiate. Rather, if you plane out the necessary steps, it is something that will develop overtime. One strategy for developing student responsibility are by creating learning contracts. Describe are the basic elements of learning contracts and how might you use them to help you to differentiate instruction? Explain appropriate times to use them and cautions to consider before introducing them to your students.
A learning contract is a plan of action between a student, teacher, and parent. This usually consists of a list goals the student hopes to achieve in order to improve his/her learning within a given time frame. In implementing this type of contract it serves to help with differentiated instruction in that it allows for student choice as well as creating conditions for individualized instruction. In giving the student choice in his/her contract allows for the student to feel a sense of responsibility and connectedness with their learning goals. These can be used either with struggling learners or gifted learners. With struggling learners this will give the student, teacher, and parents to assess things that need to worked on and improved. With a gifted student this gives them an opportunity to set lofty goals for themselves and try to attain these in a given time frame. Main points in doing these contracts are: Be specific, review contract with student, state just the facts and your desire to help them be successful, give them choices when setting goals and how they will work towards them, and lastly don't overwhelm them. Doing so may result in a lost in translation scenario. I might have to write a few of these up at home!:) Kristy Estes
ReplyDeleteYou did a nice job of summarizing all of that, Kristy!
DeleteI wanted to add that I think a big part of students grabbing hold of the responsibility is enabling them to really have the ownership of the assignment. This is where it can be a difficult balance as teachers because we still want some of that "control", too. But, if we carefully plan the contract WITH student input and allow the student to have a voice in the topic, task, and presentation of learning (or the content, process, product), they will likely feel a greater sense of responsibility for seeing the learning contract to the end. Without involving the student in the development of the contract, they may not have the task commitment/motivation needed to carry it out.