The term “IEP” stands for Individualized Education Plan. Individualized. As in, tailored to the individual. You don’t tailor an IEP by using pre-written, canned content.

That isn’t to say that you can’t use a basic skeleton of pre-written material as your starting point, but just as goals have to be tailored to the individual needs of the child, the data sheets that measure progress towards that goal must also be tailored to suit the goal. It depends on how the goal is formatted as to how the data sheet should be devised.

For example, if you had a goal that read: “When given a worksheet of 10 single digit subtraction problems per trial, [Student] will accurately calculate the correct answers with at least 80% accuracy in 4 of 5 consecutive trials within a 2-week period as measured by work samples,” then you don’t need a data sheet, per se. You’re using work samples to measure progress towards the goals.

That said, the scores on each assigned worksheet could be conveniently tracked on a single data sheet just to keep the outcomes all in one place. If the worksheets are already required of the student as part of his/her math curriculum, then presumably the grades on each will be recorded by the teacher in a grade book or a computer-based grade tracking system, as well.

But, if you have a “stranger danger” goal that reads: “Following the pre-teaching of one social story per trial, where each social story pertains to a unique situation that calls for [Student] to determine when he should say something to another person, [Student] will appropriately role play speaking or refraining from speaking to the other person as appropriate and what he should say when speaking in 4 of 5 consecutive trials within a three-week period as measured by data collection,” you’re going to have to have a data sheet.

A data sheet could include a table that has a column for the social story titles, a column for the date that each social story was presented and role played, a column indicating how many role-plays it took for the student to correctly give an appropriate response, a column indicating how many prompts were necessary for the student to correctly give an appropriate response, and a column for teacher comments. It might look like this:

Just as goal-writing can be likened to science experiments, so can data sheets. Think about every science fair experiment you did as a kid in school. What was required? You had to delineate the steps of each experimental trial and collect data on your outcomes. This is no different. Your data sheets should collect data on what you’re trying to measure, which means you’re going to have to tailor them to each goal for which they are written.

Click here to download a podcast version of this blog article.

Bookmark To

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Placement & the Least Restrictive Environment.”

Bookmark To

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “How Special Education Services are Supposed to be Selected.”

Bookmark To

During this last summer (2009), one of our volunteers brought to our attention the need for an online referral service so that parents can let other parents know who is trustworthy and gets results in their local community to work with their children with special needs. The idea was that parents could post referrals for their preferred medical doctors, alternative practitioners, therapist, gluten-free flour retailers, etc. so that other parents didn’t have to re-invent the wheel and go on a quest to find quality providers for their own children.

So, we purchased a domain name and secured hosting for http://www.specialneedslinks.info and set about seeing what we needed to do to make that happen. I took on learning what I could about PHP and SQL and started building the site as well as conducting research about all the other tools that were already out there. Then I discovered Yelp.

Most people think of Yelp in terms of finding the closest Starbucks from their iPhones, but Yelp has everything and more needed to support exactly what it was we were trying to do without me having to figure out how to build a hacker-proof database (like I have that kind of time) or pay someone else to do it (like our non-profit has the funds for stuff like that – yes, this is a shameless bid for your tax-deductible charitable donations).

So, rather than build a site from scratch, what made more sense to us was to promote the use of existing resources to serve the same purpose. The tools are only as good as we make them and it’s all about user-generated content with Yelp.

Since then, we’ve also come to find out about One Place for Special Needs (http://www.oneplaceforspecialneeds.com). This is a relatively new site, but it’s feature-rich, albeit a little confusing to navigate (at least for me). It’s also specifically designed to bring a wide variety to resources straight to the community of people dealing with disabilities. Where Yelp is for everyone and grossly underutilized by people facing special needs issues, One Place for Special Needs is specifically targeted to special needs populations and in need of new content in order to grow.

So, please help us build a rich body of online resources using these useful online tools so that parents can support each other by providing referrals to qualified, effective professionals in their local communities. If you know of other web sites that can be used for this purpose, please post a comment to this blog posting and we’ll add them to our list at http://www.specialneedslinks.info.

Bookmark To

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Writing Measurable Annual Goals – Part 2.”

Bookmark To

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Writing Measurable Annual Goals – Part 1.”

Bookmark To

It’s an easy conclusion to reach that global climate change is one of many variables in our environment to which we must respond. While it is a very big change that we can’t afford to ignore, it has to be dealt with concurrent with all of the other things we have going on. They can’t be neglected, either. Tens of thousands of relatively smaller messes is just as catastrophic to mankind as one gigantic one. It does us no good to trade one kind of crises for another.

So, to the extent that climate change receives the lion’s share of the attention devoted to solving mankind’s collective crises, special education public policy and practices receives less focus. That has a negative impact on our cause, though certainly not intentionally.

Global warming influences weather, which influences ecosystems and causes certain organisms to evolve and others to fade into extinction. Our big concern is that we are one of the species heading for extinction if we don’t do something about global warming. But, changes to the ecosystem will still have an impact on us even presuming we figure out a way to survive as a species in spite of it all.

The production of food and medicine, distribution of water, generation of energy, the types of medical care we’ll require … all of these things are directly impacted by significant changes in our weather. How will people with seasonal affective disorders react to a change in the seasons? What will changes to the types of foods that can be grown in a developing area of the planet do to the people who live there?

How will importing and exporting be impacted, including the distribution of medicine and food around the planet? Will geographically specific pockets of famine and disease arise from global warming? What about the spread of disease in water-logged areas that have been subject to flooding? Will more children be traumatized by horrific natural disasters and the war that is predicted to break out over shrinking resources?

Malnutrition, disease, and childhood trauma cause a great many disabilities. An increase in disabilities places a higher demand on the special education system, as we already know from the ongoing autism epidemic. As for autism, we still don’t know what causes it. We suspect that there are genetic predispositions to be vulnerable to certain environmental stimuli that trigger the disorder.

Even if weather is not itself a direct component of autism, it does have an influence on at least one thing that is a direct component of autism. Weather impacts all the other components of physical reality whether through temperature, humidity, air pressure, and wind force. Whatever serves as the environmental components of autism is most assuredly being acted upon in some way by the weather. We just don’t know that means for us.

For all we know, autism is nature’s very gross attempt at forcing us evolve. Maybe we need to be more logical and less social in order to survive as a species. Centuries of giving away positions of authority as political favors regardless of the recipients’ abilities to uphold the responsibilities that came with those positions has put us where we are today. Our sociability seems to have worked against us in some instances.

We don’t understand how all of these seemingly disparate, but actually inseparable, elements work together to make our reality what it is. We don’t know to what degree the presence of disabilities in our species or any other is being influence by global climate change. We can only safely say that nothing exists in a vacuum, including special education issues.

Much of what we write about in this blog speaks to how special education issues impact each of its stakeholders, which is pretty much all of us. But, equal attention has to be devoted to the things that impact special education and the epidemic rates of neurobehavioral disorders in children is certainly one of those things. It’s logical to conclude that weather has an impact on the things that influence the incident rates of various types of handicapping conditions, so it’s safe to say that through a chain of events, global climate change impacts special education public policy and practice.

What are we going to do with tomorrow’s children with special needs? How will their unique learning needs compare to those of today’s students with special needs? Will there be a shift in the types of disabilities we’re dealing with? Will infant mortality rates increase, thereby reducing the number of children with disabilities who survive to school age? Will there be a surge in the occurrence rate of a specific category of disability?

What needs to be explored is: What are the most likely outcomes given the data we have now? What can we extrapolate and predict? How does the body of data we already have relate to children with disabilities and their learning needs? I’m not aware of any formal examination of this issue. I’d be curious to know if anything like this is going on and, if so, what the findings are at this point.

On today, Blog Action Day 2009, we’re asking you to think about the possible outcomes that global warming will cause, including its impact on special education public policy and practices. We want to hear your thoughts, so please reply with your comments below.

www.blogactionday.org

Bookmark To

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast, “Present Levels of Performance – What They Are & Why We Need Them.”

Bookmark To

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast, “Why Placement Isn’t Where You Start: Understanding the IEP Process.”

Bookmark To