Classroom contract

CLASSROOM RULES

I can truly say that it was the first time when I heard about classroom contract not long ago. Of course I have rules for the students which they have to follow while at my lessons , but it was totally new idea for me to write these rules as a contract.

So, I have decided to apply this idea in one of my groups. Unfortunately it is far from the beginning that I teach this group of students, so I can’t say that this is the forming stage, but I think that it is never too late to have improvement. 

At the beginning of the lesson when I announced to the students about the plans to write a list of rules for the group, my 8^th grade teens were surprised and excited.

For better group work I asked them to rearrange the desks. As a result, sitting at the “conference” table made our cooperative work easier.

First there was the brainstorming about all kinds of school rules. I asked students to write down their ideas. Here some behavior problems occurred (as there are two boys, who tend to misbehave). I predicted such situation, so I asked these two to start decorating the poster (which I wanted to do by  the end of the lesson and prepared some coloured paper, pencils and pictures with glue).

Another difficulty was that very quickly students ran out of the ideas, so I helped them ( I have written some of the points which I found in the course forum).

There was one more aspect which I had to deal with – the mixed skills  levels of students. To keep the students with  lower level engaged in mutual work I asked them to find necessary words in the dictionary.

In general all the students took active part in composing the list of rules. I am satisfied with their work and the bright poster is a new element in our classroom.

What surprised me most was the fact that they have only two “rules for the teacher”. And these are to be fair and respect the students. Which I gladly agreed to follow.

I think that next time I would use the same strategy. The only thing that I might change is asking students to think about the list of the rules at home, so that there will be less time used for brainstorming (as we have only 45 min to complete the task).

 The result of our work. Now we have to follow the rules.