Contract Activities Rationale
Contract Activities are a variety of activities that are organised around a theme or context and can be used for a variety of purposes. They are one way of incorporating thinking skills into the curriculum program. The activities should be supported by additional approaches within the classroom (ideally differentiation of the curriculum) and based on explicit teaching of skills and related genre or content.
Contracts can be developed to:
| Incorporate a variety of thinking tasks at different levels of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy |
| Incorporate a number of different thinking strategies such as keys and hats into meaningful activities |
| Present a number of activities within a Smarts context |
Use of contracts should be based on the following underlying principles:
Contracts should be fun and exciting.
Contracts should be designed to allow students to work at their own pace and at their own level.
Children should experience success and be rewarded for higher-order thinking. Creativeness should be encouraged as should divergent and lateral thinking.
Contracts should be a meaningful part of the current classroom curriculum and integrate many ideas, and strategies that are currently being taught within the classroom setting.
To ensure students’ successful completion of Contract Activities specific thinking strategies, genres or content areas should be explicitly covered or taught and modeled previously.
Students should be provided with completed samples of activities and models of the specific genre or thinking strategy to ensure student success.
Students should be given specific instructions about what is expected of them and ensure they have the prior experience and the specific content and procedural knowledge that is necessary for success.
Students should see the purpose for the activities. This should be obvious within the context of the current classroom program OR the links could be explicitly drawn by the teacher.
When planning Contract Activities for the classroom, it is important to incorporate a variety of different, yet familiar, strategies within the tasks; to cater for a variety of learning styles and Multiple Intelligences.