You’ve probably heard your students talking about making social contracts in their classes. And you might have asked yourself, “what is a social contract?” Social contracts are the guidelines in our classrooms that students write out to determine how they are agreeing to treat each other.
Wayne Christian School strives to strengthen the relationship between teachers and students in their classrooms. Capturing Kids’ Hearts is a process that helps us achieve classrooms of high-performing students. It is a relationship-building approach to discipline that creates self-managing classrooms. Capturing Kids’ Hearts enables teachers to create high-achieving classrooms by strengthening student’s connectedness to others through enhancing healthy bonds with their teachers and establishing collaborative agreements of acceptable behavior, called Social Contracts.
At the beginning of the school year, each classroom will develop a Social Contract. The students, facilitated by their teacher, will flush out the behaviors that personify what God calls us to do in Micah 6:8. Through this process, the teacher will ensure that the following four questions are covered. The four questions include:
- How do you want to be treated by the teacher?
- How do you want to be treated by each other?
- How do you think the teacher wants to be treated by you?
- How do we want to treat each other when there is conflict?
The resulting answers make up a list of adjectives which serve as the basis for student expectations of behavior in the classroom. The Social Contract is signed by all classroom members including the teacher. The document is a living document and is referred to on a regular basis to highlight success and serves as a guide for when problems arise.
Capturing Kids’ Hearts is a process. The goal is to maintain classroom boundaries while preserving the relationship between students and teachers, and Capturing Kids’ Heart is the process at the basis of our discipline policy. You can find more information about social contracts and the CKH process in our student handbook.
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