Example Custom Learning Contract
Best wishes, Brian, for your school’s success.
Each of Ohio’s 611 districts drew up a plan for implementing the Credit Flex option. Most included a form. Some were designed to encourage teens. Others, not so much. We may not have 611 unique examples to share, but quite a few!
Most all include a few necessary, student-centered elements, which anyone can easily replicate. They ask teens:
- What are your goals in pursuing this custom learning option?
- What are you going to do to learn it?
- Who’s going to help you? What else will you need?
- How will we know when you have achieved your goals, and to what degree of success?
To my mind, the ‘Who’s going to help you?’ is the key to transforming high school.
Of those I looked at, Hamilton Local offered a good example of a form. While perhaps a bit of overkill for some work, it asks the teen to think thoroughly through the lens of these elements:
- Proposal
- Plan
- Progress
- Presentation
- Product
- Performance
You can see their contract form here.
Some districts I know that have made good and frequent use of CreditFlex include Reynoldsburg, New Albany, Dublin City, Gahanna-Jefferson, Granville Exempted, Orange City, and Breckville-Broadview Heights. You can search ‘credit flexibility’ in their or other district web sites.
My primary mission these days is to secure support and funding for far greater sharing of custom learning contracts. Toward that end, we’d developed two prototype apps: creditflexibility.org and badgeHS.com
To go above 5,000 or so Ohio teens participating in this, we believe there must be far more sharing and validating of template plans.
Without vetted templates, this option will remain a boutique opportunity for select students who enjoy particular attention by district teachers, counselors, or administrative staff. And even those, largely in school districts with above-average sized school leadership teams.
As an example of how a complex, first-rate learning plan might work, we’ve drafted one for learning web programming.
