Didactic Contract

The didactic contract is a concept describing the implicit and explicit expectations that a teacher and a learner hold of each other in a classroom, introduced in the 1980s by the French mathematics educator Guy Brousseau. Brousseau defined it as the set of learner behaviors a teacher expects, together with the set of teacher behaviors a learner expects, covering the shared responsibilities each side carries for knowledge in the classroom. The concept addresses a basic paradox of teaching: a teacher must guide a student toward learning without simply supplying the answer, so the student is left to build understanding through problem-solving rather than through passively receiving information, and it remains a foundational idea in didactics and in mathematics-education theory. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/