NATHAN
GALSTER
Learning Contract
Project Overview
Everything about this project is completely your choice. You will choose an area of your English that you want to improve, find a way to practice it and submit your work to me. You will even tell me how to grade it.
You will complete a learning contract, create an assessment for your work and show your work in some way. I will help you with the assessment. It's your choice how you show/present your work.
Project Deadlines:
You will choose your schedule for when to work on this project. However, the deadline to submit your work for this project is 5/15-5/17. Thus, you can complete the project by or anytime before this date. If you choose to set an earlier deadline, your work will be due on that day.
Project Dates
Final Deadline: 5/15 (Monday) - 5/17 (Wednesday)
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The deadline day depends on your class schedule (it must be on one of our class meeting days)
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You must submit your work, your completed learning contract and assessment with self and peer score completed on your deadline day.
Step 1: Set Your Goal
First, you need to decide what you want to improve. The four basic skills of language are:
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Speaking
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Listening
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Reading
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Writing
What area do you think you need the most work? Is there something you really want to do in English, like read your favorite novel or see a movie without subtitles? This could be your goal.
Are you interested in expanding your vocabulary? Click here
Do you want to improve your reading skills? Click here
Step 2: Choose Your Path
Now you need to decide how you want to practice this skill to work towards your goal. For example, if you want to improve your listening, what do you want to listen to? Do you like music? Maybe you could listen to your favorite band. Do you like baseball? The news? Listen to that.
In this step, you also need to start thinking about how you will SHOW me and the class your work. For example, if you practice your listening skills by listening to music, how can you show your progress? You might make some listening worksheets, complete them as you listen and submit them as your work. You could write a reflection or interpretration of the lyrics. You could give a presentation to the class about the music you listened to. It's all up to you. You can decide how you show the work. You will also need to decide how much work you will do. I will negotiate this with you.
Step 3: Destination
When you have completed your work and you are ready to give it to me, you will need to tell me how you want me to assess it. How do you want me to grade it? It's worth 10 points, remember.
We will keep this simple and I will help you with creating the assessment. Our goal is to give you points for your work. So, we will create a simple assessment to divide your work into 10 points.
Student Examples
Writing Goal: Group Chat
These students chose to work together on this project and made a regular schedule to chat in English using Kakao Talk. Each students goal and work was a little different but all were related to writing.
Click below to see one student's example. She wrote reflections of the group discussions and included screenshots of some of the chats for reference.
Speaking Goal: Pronunciation Practice
This student chose to increase his vocabulary and improve his pronunciation by watching a TV show in English. By listing new words, defining them and recording himself speaking them he worked to achieve his goal. He created an excellent powerpoint presentation as a way to show his hard work.