From the start the Dalton team of Wenzhou Dalton Elementary School have been learning, exploring and practicing “Contract Assignment”. Until this day, the practice of “Contract” has become truly a daily routine of the teachers, students and parents at our school. Every week, students get a piece of “Assignment Contract” in a digital form, on which they could read over all the assignments from every subject and make an assignment schedule of their own. Students are provided with opportunities to discuss and set their own goals, tasks and expected results of learning with their class teachers, until an agreement is reached upon the assignment for that week and the “contract” is ready to be signed by both. For different age groups of children, teachers designed diverse models of the “contract”, in order to realize the goals for the developmental stages of independency, responsibility and self-reliance of the students. Thanks to the usage of contract and assignment, learning has become an effective and well-organized Dalton process. Recently, Wenzhou Dalton team has been handing handing a concluding report of a provincial level research subject titled “Contract Assignment: The Original Assignment Model of Raising Independent Learners”. We are so proud that this great assignment tradition of Dalton is now also enlightening the new assignment culture in China with approval and acknowledgement from students, teachers, parents, managers and governors. The research on quality and effectiveness of contract in Chinese Dalton Schools is going to be started this year.
