Background :
 I run the school’s high school newspaper, The 411.  It is a wonderful opportunity for the students, who have language-based learning difficulties, to work on skills that they find very difficult.  It also is an activity that many students partake in to include on their college resumes.  Currently I have a student staff of 19 writers.  We meet twice a week to discuss, work on, edit, and layout the current articles for a bi-monthly issue.  The attendance to the newspaper meetings and the writing of the articles has become very sparse.  The students I am working with possess many executive function disorders, and can be very forgetful.
 I have tried several approaches to motivate the students to take more of a vested interest in what they are doing.  The first thing I tried was a pizza party.  Attendance was quite high during this meeting, but when the next meeting came around and there was work to be done, conveniently the students forgot about it.  The next thing I tried was acting like a tough guy, but of course this wasn’t received well by the students because the ones that were at the meeting were not in need of any type of scolding or talking too.

Goal :
 In order to make the students understand that if they were going to have articles published in the paper that they would need to both attend the meetings and do some work, I decided to check around on the www.behavioradvisor.com website.  I found a whole page describing The Contract idea and decided that this method was very good for motivating this particular group of students to rise to the challenges of being part of the school newspaper.
Implementation :
 In March I had an announcement over the loud speaker that called a mandatory meeting of the paper for its regularly scheduled time on Monday afternoons.  I subsequently went and personally spoke to each child to make sure that he/she was aware of this meeting and would be in attendance.  When the meeting time arrived all but two students showed up.  I had the other students paged to the room and they appeared, apologizing for having forgotten about the meeting.
 I began the meeting by talking about how being on the newspaper was an honor and also a large responsibility on their parts.  I praised their prior successes, and asked them what they thought they could do to improve the current attendance and article turn-in rate.  They came up with all the right ideas about making sure they come to meetings and about following deadlines by themselves.  I asked the group, “So how do we make sure that you follow the rules and ideas that you just named?”  The students didn’t seem to know.  I suggested, “Could we have some kind of contract that we work up in order to make sure that you doing your articles and coming to the meetings on time?”  They all seemed to think that this was a great idea.  So together on the dry erase board, which I later typed up and distributed to all the children (and mailed home to their parents) we devised a contract.
 The contract had the requirements of being part of the paper that the students had to sign and date, and it also had a penalty and a reward clause.  The penalty clause was that non-compliance with the rules that they drafted about attendance and dead-lines would lead to their name not being included in the paper (which was important to the many students who wanted to list this as a major academic form of an extra-curricular activity for college applications) and that they would no longer be able to hold an editorial position in the paper.  The reward clause was that they would be eligible for a school journalism award solely by meeting attendance and deadline requirements.  The reward was picked by the students as their stipulation to following the rules that they devised.  I also added that we would have a pizza party at the end of every issue, and only those with near perfect attendance would be allowed to attend.
 I printed up this contract, signed it with the student, and we each kept one copy.  In addition to the student’s copy, one copy was sent home so that the parents could see what the importance was of finishing an article or attending a meeting.  (The parents are usually more eager than the student to have these Newspaper credentials appear on their child’s application to schools.)

Outcome :
 The behavior change that occurred after these contracts were drafted was remarkable.  Attendance was nearly perfect from the time the third issue went into planning, until the very end when the printing and folding took place.  The students seemed to feel a true sense of responsibility and ownership over what they were doing, it’s importance, and what hung in the balance for them.   The parents were very pleased with the idea, the students themselves were excited to be fulfilling what they saw as an obligation, and I as the advisor was quite excited and pleased as well.  I rewarded the students with praise, and of course, a pizza party.

Analysis :
 I feel that the contracts were such a success because it simply provided motivation for things that the students already had wanted to accomplish.  They wanted to get their name on the paper under the heading of their own article.  They wanted to get to put down that they worked on the school newspaper on their college forms.  They also wanted the satisfaction of completing an article and having met a goal that they had set for themselves.
 The contract behavior change was wonderful for the 19 students who are a part of the newspaper group.  I will soon try to adapt the contract idea and implement it in a class that I teach where the homework ethic has begun to decline.  The results have truly increased my faith in my students’ abilities, and I believe it has given them more faith and more belief in their own selves.  In my opinion, that alone is a solid success.