How to Create a Student-Led Classroom Behaviour Contract in Primary School

Creating a classroom behaviour contract at the start of term is a good way to let students know what will be expected of them in the coming weeks and months of the school year. It also tells them what the consequences will be if they don’t follow the rules. Does this sound like a win-win?

We realise that classroom guidelines and even the consequences aren’t going to mean much if you don’t have student buy-in. That’s why teachers on the Teach Starter team swear by the process of creating a student-led classroom contract!

Thinking this is the year you’ll give the contract a try? Read on for tips from our teacher team on how behaviour contracts work and how to get students excited about the process of making their own rules (and some rules for you too!).

How Do Students Make Behaviour Contracts?

We may have made you a little nervous with this idea. Rules for you? Made by your students? Let’s back up here for a second and talk about what it means when a student makes a classroom behaviour contract.

They aren’t gathering in a pod without you, drafting nonsense guidelines that will let them eat a lot of chocolate and ignore their maths lessons. Still, you want to create a collaborative learning experience, and working together on the rules can help make that happen.

Instead of handing your students a list of class rules, and then moving on to the next task on your list, working together with your students to create a contract makes the learning process more collaborative.

How to Create a Classroom Behaviour Contract

There are many ways to create a student-led classroom behaviour contract with your class, but the following process outlines how to create a contract with students that’s based on our teacher team’s experiences. Feel free to pick and choose the ideas that work for you and your class!

Step 1 — Identify Your Class WHY

Your class WHY is the purpose, cause, or belief that will drive you to create a student-led classroom contract, to implement it and to stick to it.

Explain to your students that a classroom contract is a written or spoken agreement about how you will make the classroom a great place to learn and have fun. Ask your students the following key questions:

• What is the purpose of a classroom behaviour contract?
• Why is a classroom contract important?
• How will a classroom contract benefit you?
• What would our classroom look, sound, and feel like without a classroom contract?

Step 2 — Discuss the Three Pillars of Respect

The next step to creating a classroom behaviour contract is to lay the foundations and to discuss the value of respect.

Many of the classroom expectations that will become part of your classroom contract will be based on what we like to call the three pillars of respect:

1. Respect yourself.
2. Respect others.
3. Respect the environment.

Ask your students, ‘What the world would look like without respect?’

Step 3 — Picture a Perfect Classroom

Next, encourage your students to start mapping out their perfect classroom with the rules they want to see put in place in their behaviour contract — this is where you really get their buy-in! This is still the brainstorming phase, so no idea is off the table (yet). 

An easy way to do this is with our Free Classroom Behaviour Task Cards. The task cards have been designed with a small group activity in mind. The prompts on the cards encourage students to think about how positive behaviours might look, sound and feel. The behaviours are linked to respecting self, others and the environment.

The Y-Chart Graphic Organiser is also crying out to be part of the collaborative learning activity — download and print one out for each student!

Here’s one way to do it:

• Arrange your students into small groups. Allocate roles using Cooperative Working Role Cards.
• Provide each group with one of the task cards and a copy of the graphic organiser.
• Encourage your students to brainstorm ideas and record them on the Y-Chart. Let them know that they can put anything down, including rules for you. 
• The ‘feeling’ section can be a bit challenging for some students — just encourage them to think about how it would feel to practise that behaviour.

At the end of the learning experience, draw out that life will feel pretty good in the classroom when there’s a united agreement to respect ourselves, each other and the environment.

Step 4 — Get Sticky Note Happy

By now, your students will be bursting with ideas about how to make your classroom a great place to be! What’s more, they will know why a classroom behaviour contract is important and how they will benefit.

The next step to creating a classroom contract is to ask your students to think of three behaviours, or actions, that they would like to include in the contract. Encourage your students to start their sentences with ‘do’ rather than ‘don’t.’

It’s a good idea to steer your students’ thinking in the right direction by writing headings on the board that reflect areas of classroom expectation. What these headings are is entirely up to you and your class, but some good areas of classroom expectation you might want to include are:

• Relationships
• Work standards
• In the classroom
• Speaking and listening
• Cooperation/teamwork

When your students have thought of three ideas, encourage them to stick them on the board under the corresponding headings.

Download a template for printing on sticky notes!

Year 3 teacher Amy (you may know her as @heyteacherteacher on Instagram) uses a similar sticky note system for planning classroom contracts, but she shared this idea that may suit your classroom:

‘As a class, we discussed our four school rules and each student wrote a message on how they can follow each rule. I used the Just Be Behaviour Expectation posters from Teach Starter to help create a display for my class that we can refer to on a daily basis.’

Step 5 — Refine and Reduce Your Classroom Expectations

The next step to creating a classroom contract may be the hardest! It’s time to pick out the most important classroom expectations and put the others to one side. You’ll probably find that there are double-ups and also ideas that can be combined. There is no golden rule about how many classroom expectations you should have, but aim for no more than two per area of expectation in your classroom contract. Any more than this, and your students will find it hard to manage and you’ll find it too hard to implement.

When you have whittled your classroom expectations to a number that works for you and your class, you’re ready! Print the contract, and post where students can refer back to the agreement. 

How to Keep Up a Classroom Behaviour Contract

After all of this hard work, one would like to think that it’s going to last. Unless you make frequent references (we are talking several times each day) to your new classroom contract, it’s likely to evaporate into insignificance. The reality is you’ll need to work on making the rules habit!

Giving explicit praise linked to your classroom contract is crucial. For example, ‘I am going to give Jasper a table point because I noticed him looking at Sarah when she was speaking.’

Link your classroom contract to your classroom reward system, and reward your students for upholding their commitment to the classroom contract. Believe us; it’s worth every minute of planning, preparing and doing. 

Explore our favourite positive reinforcement resources created by teachers for your classroom!