It's not that the IEP process is necessarily that hard. It's really as hard as you decide it's going to be. Before now I had them strewn throughout the year whenever they were due for each child, but at my new school they designate two weeks at the beginning of the year for you get your annual IEPs finished.
You know how some people function better under pressure or seem to get more done when they have an absolutely packed schedule? I am most definitely not one of them, but this experience made me focus my attention and efforts in a new way. When you do things quickly, you don't want to do them sloppily (especially when you are a new hire, like me), so I just paid more attention to detail . . . and really began to question the whole process altogether.
How do we choose goals? Is it primarily from testing results? Do we just look at the progress students have made on their old goals and decide to either discontinue or take them one step further? It seems like such an obvious question, but it made me wonder if I could have done more with past goals to support the child's curriculum and really develop a skill that, once mastered, would help him get a leg up on his academics as a whole.Goals are supposed to help students progress toward their grade-level standards and build necessary skills. But I think that in the rush of the whole evaluating/writing process, sometimes the goals become the main course of the student's school career rather than merely ingredients that play into a greater curriculum.
About a year ago, I volunteered at a special education school for a few days. Part of my job was to help the students work toward their goals, which they did on a daily basis. I remember one student in particular who had a goal of tracing various wagon trails heading west. Now, in his grade level, understanding the westward movement was something that was being taught and so I can see why his teacher felt this goal was appropriate.
But for this student and from what I came to understand, his whole “chunk” of that lesson was merely to trace the trails every single day. He wasn't being tested on the history of it or whether or not he comprehended why there even was a westward movement. As long as he could trace where the trails were, he would meet his goal — and there you'd have it, another successful IEP.
But really? How did that help him in the long run? I wondered what academic subjects were being enhanced by his new ability to trace lines from left to right. If his original teacher expected more of him, would he have been able to work toward that new expectancy and meet it?
Another year, I had a student come to me with 28 goals. Twenty...eight...goals. The student needed full assistance and step-by-step prompting to simply pick up a pencil, and they wanted me to touch on 28 goals daily? I thought they were nuts, and by “they” I mean whoever got together and decided that baby steps were old-fashioned.
I held an addendum and brought the goal list down to seven while keeping most of the original IEP skill sets intact. That way I could at least work them into the daily schedule. Even if the 28 goals were all things that the student absolutely needed to work on, overwhelming him (and his new teacher) wasn't going to help him progress.
I guess what I'm getting at is that goals are not “one size fits all,” and that if you don't keep the larger curriculum and lessons in mind, giving a student even 40 goals isn't really going to help her progress meaningfully. I wonder if there were times I assigned goals because I knew the students could do them and I wanted them to be successful. I was thinking of something they could do, not something they need to be able to do in order to be successful at other school tasks.
This year I stopped looking at the IEP process as “setting goals” and started referring to it as “building skills.” It puts a different spin on some of the choices when you think, “This year, I am going to build these five skills that will help students in these ways: _______.”
I highly recommend thinking of the IEP process in this way. Once the student has the skill, build upon it or work on a skill that utilizes the first and enhances it. Think of all the skills our students would have under their belts after a couple years, rather than just goals they've met along their journey through the grades.
It's just an idea; you could still stick to goals. The most important thing is that the goals we write are meaningful, relevant to the student's ability level, and things they can use and will need long after the goal itself is discontinued.
I completely agree with your position. Goals should be meaningful and help students in life. Although there must be short and long term goals, as educators we must ask ourselves, how is this going to help the student beyond this classroom - in their academic life after they are promoted.
Posted by: Corissa | February 08, 2012 at 08:49 PM
Jennifer,
I agree with you on how I feel that I must always follow the rules as I have only been an inclusion teacher for the past three years. I often feel that I must do as I am told. Therefore, I assist the special education teacher in my room to write the annual IEP goals for each of my learning support students. We do tend to try to write the educational goals for our learning support students. I feel that these goals are followed through and do have meaning to the learners' academic process. However, I have found that when I worked in the Early Intervention Classroom and had children with Autism, their goals tended to be more functional as I was told that I had to help them to become a functional member society. I do consider either type of goal as a "Building Skill", as you had stated. This is because we must meet all different needs with different goals and you are right when you say that the "one size fits all" model does not work for everyone. Our students are all very diverse and very different.
Posted by: Stephanie Hoch | June 09, 2010 at 10:06 AM
Jennifer,
I also worked in a district where IEP's where spread out over the year by student birthday, and now in my current district it is all in a three week span as well. It is a difficult transition and making sure the IEP is complete is nerve racking. You really focused of goals and you are right it is not one size fits all when it comes to developing purposeful mastery levels to work toward. You really have to take the whole student into consideration not just their academic performance. "Building Skills" is a great way to look at it. I also liked how you state the goal and set ways of getting there. If we are really in it to help make the student successful we need to make sure that we keep him/her in mind and not finishing the IEP. Thanks for the insight.
Posted by: Paul Moon | June 08, 2010 at 09:35 PM
This is very true, and I have to note a typo in my posting. The student I was mentioning who was tracing the lines of the westward movement was not doing so from left to right, but from right to left.
If it had been from left to right, I would have also felt that it would help progress reading and writing goals. That was the source of my confusion, because I felt that it somewhat hindered his writing goals and reading practice.
I had inquired about the background information being taught, but the goal stated that the student needed to trace the lines, so the teacher color coded the trails and the student practiced tracing the lines. I didn't mean to point this out in order to find fault with the teacher in any way. When I asked this teacher why the student was merely tracing the lines, the teacher stated that it was what the goal said to do. He acted confused by the goal but was following the rules.
My original inspiration for posting this was that the teacher I was working with reminded me of how I felt when I was new to teaching ( Yes, I'm still new to teaching and probably will always feel like that)but esp. in the beginning, I wanted to make sure my students were following their IEPs. I was not comfortable with incorporating goals into other activities that would explore that skill set, because I wanted them to be able to do exactly what their goal stated when it came time for assessing the task.
It made me wonder how many other new teachers have felt like they needed to follow the rules too, and make sure they were having the student practice the goal exactly as it was written. I know we write goals so that they support lifelong skills, but sometimes we leave out things we mean to say about why the student has the goal or how they are using it in their curriculum, because we know the student so well and don't realize how it might be read by a new set of eyes. If we address and emphasize the skills needed more directly rather than the task to help the student gain the skill, perhaps that message will translate more clearly.
I appreciate your feedback and agree that it is our job to find a link. My suggestion is that we help highlight the skills to link for teachers who are not yet familiar with our students, and who may just be getting comfortable with teaching. It's just another way of sending a message about what our students need. I'll admit, I'm still working on sending my messages because although I know what I am thinking, I don't always realize how my blogs might be read by a new set of eyes.
Thank you for reading.
Posted by: Jennifer | November 10, 2009 at 02:02 AM
I agree whole-heartedly that the bottom line is all about providing our students with the facts, skills and strategies that they can apply for future learning experiences. It cannot simply be an isolated mastery of goals for a specific lesson or moment in time!
Now, some IEPs will come our way where goals seem to be just to get through the moment of a particular lesson--like the tracing trails one you mentioned. The bottom line here is that along the way of mastering this tracing goal, you are addressing so many other skills that can be applied to lifelong learning. There are always ways to weave in lifelong learning skills that these students need beyond that one lesson. In your example, perhaps there were visual/spatial needs. So the fact that he needed to trace the lines from left to right worked to strengthen his ability to take notes and write legibly in other academic situations....(just a thought). I also believe that as he traced...there was discussion about the content-- which served to extend his background knowledge about that time period...which can help him construct meaning during future social studies lessons....
Thanks for sending the message that IEP goals should be written to support transfer of necessary lifelong skills rather than isolated one-time lesson oriented skills.
I'd like to add...if some goals are not...it is up us to find the link, within the goal(s), to meaningful transfer of skills....
Posted by: Elizabeth Stein | October 25, 2009 at 12:58 PM