How to Help Young Students Get Ready to Participate in Their IEP Meetings
By Mary B. Schreiner
When I first invited high school students to attend their own IEP meetings, I was surprised at their reactions. Typical responses were "I don't want to sit there with all those adults and get yelled at" or "I won't understand what everyone's talking about." The idea that they as students could contribute meaningfully was a foreign and frightening idea. For most who did attend, participation at meetings was a passive affair and expressing their preferred goals was an almost non-existent occurrence.
As a result of witnessing this discomfort, I developed a way for younger children with disabilities (in grades 6 and 7) to learn and practice goal attainment long before their involvement in their own meetings would be required by law. I hoped that by learning how to set and monitor personal goals, they would not only participate more appropriately in annual meetings, but would also become more self-determined in other aspects of their lives.
I started with the idea for an instructional strategy based on the football concept of the two point conversion, which I called "GO FOR IT." I told the students the letters stood for the following steps: Goal set, Organize my plan, Follow my plan, Observe my progress, Record my progress, Inspect my progress and Try it again. We discussed the idea that when football players "go for it" (the two point conversion), they must try harder to succeed in making a touchdown but are rewarded by additional points when they are successful. I encouraged my students to memorize the steps of the strategy at the same time we began instruction in how the strategy would actually work. I developed a series of lessons to teach this goal attainment strategy. First, the students brainstormed examples of goals and looked at the IEP goals others had written for them. Some were asked to work on a goal they wrote themselves, and others were asked to work on one of their own IEP goals.
The types of goals sixth and seventh grade students chose surprised me--only some chose school-related skills to improve. Many wanted to work on an athletic or personal-social goal instead. All goals were welcomed as long as the students thought they could improve in the next month or so and could measure that improvement somehow. The students who worked on teacher-written goals instead of their own grudgingly agreed, saying "Do we have to? I'd rather do my own!" See below for some of the goals the students set.
Once goals were finalized, students wrote a personal rubric that would help them judge whether or not they met their goals. With goals and rubrics in hand, the next step was teaching students to develop a way to self-monitor their progress. Some chose simple checklists or tally systems; others looked to outside individuals (teachers or peers) to provide input on how they were doing on their goals. We discussed where and when the self-monitoring forms would be kept by each student, so that they would not forget to do them. Finally, all students graphed their goal progress for about three weeks.
Following completion of all the lessons and a period of graphing, students used their personal rubrics to judge how well they had achieved their original goal. I asked the students to tell me how important their goals were to them. Surprisingly, the majority of the students felt that their teachers' goals were just as important as any they developed themselves; but when given a choice, they unanimously prefered working on their own goals to working on one their teachers wrote for their IEP's.
Writing of the goals was perhaps the hardest part of teaching students the GO FOR IT Strategy. Although students were told to make their goal statements "focused, important, realistic, and measurable" (FIRM), many struggled to produce a quality statement.
Despite difficulty in writing goals, most of the students, believed they met or exceeded their original expectations for achieving the goal in the time allotted. Motivation for setting the goals and keeping the self-monitoring records was high. Students especially liked the "Try it again" step, pleased that if they did not succeed at first, they could change their plan and still try to reach their goal. When asked why he thought he was successful in reaching his goal, one student announced, "I really tried and I wanted to do it. I worked hard!"
Mary B. Schreiner is a professor at Alvernia College
In Reading, Pa. She is a member of the Pennsylvania CEC.
Sample Goal Statements of Sixth and Seventh Graders
Not be sent to time-out more than once a day
Become a better drawer
Come prepared and ready for tests
Keep my binder clean
To do better handwriting
Get to class on time
Get assignments done on time
Spell 10 harder words a week
Study 45 minutes a night
Get an A in math
Play with my brother for at least an hour each day
Fight with my sister only 2 times a week
Make at least 13 goals in the rest of the soccer season
Do a back flip by myself so that my dance teacher says I did it correctly
By the end of the year have $150 for mowing the yard
Lose 10 pounds
Run 2 miles 3 days a week
Ride my bike with my dad 5 times a week
Practice my trumpet every other day for 30 minutes
Take my dog for a walk every other day except for when it's rainy
I ran accross this article in a daily newsletter I read. I thought it may help some of you out there who wish to have your child involved in the IEP process
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