Full Value Contract Tap Cards

Some students walk into my gym and never actually arrive.

I call them wanderers. They come through the doors and seem completely disconnected from anything that's going on. They drift, they do their own thing, and they tend to pull the rest of the class off course with them. When I remind them of our expectations, they carry right on wandering.

I ran into a group of them in SK8TOWN, a skateboarding-based program I built for students who are struggling to demonstrate responsible behaviours in PE and around the school more generally. The more I sat with that behaviour, the more I realised part of the problem was mine. My expectations for what positive engagement actually looks like in my lessons were not as clear as I thought they were. Worse, I had no system for the two things that turn out to matter most: constantly reminding students of those expectations, and regularly inviting them to commit to meeting them.

Around the same time, I had been digging into adventure education and Project Adventure's approach to it. One idea kept surfacing: the Full Value Contract, a shared and conscious agreement about how people are expected to behave together. The catch is that a Full Value Contract only works if it gets revisited, re-discussed, and recommitted to on a regular basis. A contract that lives on a wall and never gets mentioned again is not a contract. It's decoration.

So I turned it into a ritual. This set of tap cards lives outside my gym doors. Before students enter my teaching space, they tap the "I'm All In!" card as a display of their commitment to our Full Value Contract. Following Project Adventure's approach, each part of the contract is assigned to a finger on the hand:

👋 Be Here. (Thumb) Show up in body and in attention. You are a part of this class.

🦺 Be Safe. (Index) Look after your own body, and look after everybody else's.

💬 Be Honest. (Middle) Say what's true, own what happened, and play the game straight.

🎯 Set Goals. (Ring) Know what you're working on today.

🎉 Have Fun! (Pinky) This is play. Enjoy it.

I keep a second set at my Breather Bench. That way, when a student needs to step out of the activity, recommitting to our Full Value Contract is what brings them back in. Not an apology. Not a lecture. A tap.

This is not my first run at a program like this, and it will not be my last. What I can tell you is that this ritual finally gave me the language to get every student in the room on the same page about how we are together in physical education. Even the ones who were still wandering.

Happy Teaching!