In the first part of this article, social contracts were presented as a method to teach student to manage their own behavior in class and to minimize classroom disruption throughout the course of a school day. There are a variety of different professionals and programs that utilize the social contact as a tool and this has resulted in a variety of different styles and methods for building a social contract. T his article we will focus on the methods already used my teachers to create posters and methods used in desktop publishing to produce posters.
The Key Elements
A variety of different programs and methods employ as a method of teaching students to monitor their own behavior. In most of these methods several common elements are used; 1) behavioral questions, 2) positive comments, 3) possible consequences and 4) signatures. In the first part of this article, these elements were explained already, but it should be noted that they elements could be designed to enhance their meaning.
Basic Design
Since the social contracts we are discussing in these articles contain four major elements, it would be best to design your classroom contracts so that they are setup in some time square or rectangular layout. This method allows the four major elements or sections of the poster to be big enough that they can contain all of the information that needs to be included at a size that can be easily read for at least three feet away. This leads us to the text of your poster, since we will be using titles and smaller text on the social contracts being created, in order to maintain a design aesthetic a single font such Times New Roman or Helvetica should be used. If you would like to set a title off from the rest of the text on the page, a more formal or decorative font can be used for the different titles of the poster. You do want to keep in mind not to mix more than two different fonts together as this can create a very unorganized and chaotic design overall. Additionally to give your poster a professional and clean look you will want to make sure that items printed or removed from paper sources are cut cleanly and squarely. This often means using a razor-knife to square off edges and making sure they are cut with equally sized margins and borders.
Putting It All Together
Finally, once your social contracts are designed and all of the elements have been created, it is time to pull them all together. If you are creating a standard style of posterized social contracts, you may want to use a program like Microsoft’s Publisher and the tools within it to create the graphics and text of your poster. If you can create a nice looking document in a Word, than you should have the basic skill set to create a great looking social contract in Publisher that can be printed on most standard poster sizes including 24”x36” poster size. If you are looking for a non-computer method using a piece of poster board as your base is a great option. Next6 you would want to create your design elements, cut with nice clean cut edges and neatly written or printed text.
One final note, be creative when planning out your social contract, but keep in mind that in your students eyes a clean professional social contract will carry more weight than a simple and quickly hand drawn social contract. This feeling of validity can help your students to buy into your social quicker and stronger than a simply “slapped” together social contract.