Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Learning Contracts - how should these work?

Ds8 is in a gt pullout once a week. We recently saw the gt teacher and discussed ds working with her to develop some of his designs more fully.
She said he can come to her and they can put together a plan for something he wants to work on and he'll have to commit to it, and get it done.
This all sounded ok, but I said, well...I'm not sure how comfortable he'll be coming to you first. She just said 'Well, I'm sure he'll be able to do it'. I guess I'm just venting, because as anticipated it's been about 4 weeks since this discussion, the school year is down to about 7 useful weeks and we *both* forgot to send him in with his inventions/design notebook the first week. After that he forgot to ask the next week, then there was spring break and so on. SO.
I really think it's good to have him try this, even the part about doing the asking himself, but I'm just concerned he's going to miss the boat to work on some of this stuff - but then again I'm not really sure what all the teacher can do with him to flesh these out more. Any ideas/experience on that aspect would be great.

Also, anyone else's school do this sort of learning contract? What works well and what pitfalls are there to look out for? (besides the one we're in right now

Missed this the first time... My DS is asked to submit sort of an "outline" when he'd like to explore special subjects. It's not really a contract but he does have to list questions he'd like to answer etc. He works with the GT coordinator on these and she won't let him start until his thoughts are on paper.

Hi, thanks for posting! The stars all finally aligned yesterday and ds was able to speak to his gt teacher about his ideas/notebook. She said they can work on them, he has to take a pre-test on robotics, which I thought in and of itself was pretty cool...hopefully this is just to find a place to start with him on it.
Pretty sure they won't be building anything this year, but at least learning about it is rather exciting! ...apparently he started this test yesterday and will do more next week.
And I do believe she means to have him commit to something concrete on paper as a goal and have him sign it.