For too long, we have been writing disjointed IEPs because of the common and outdated practice of acting as separate entities instead of being a collaborative team.
I bet this sounds familiar:
The Speech/Language therapist writes communication goals and inserts them into the computerized IEP form.
The Occupational Therapist writes fine motor goals and
inserts them into the IEP form.
The Special Educator writes… I think you know where I'm going with this.
The result of this outdated should-never-have-happened-in-the-first- place practice is a disjointed IEP. This leads to so many adults working on separate, unrelated goals and don’t lead to your child accessing and making progress in general education classrooms.
When I was a special
education teacher I wrote these kinds of IEPs and I know this is still common practice. Most parents and teachers believe this is the way to write an IEP because this is only way they've seen it done.
The IEP Planning
Process developed by Vandercook, T., Bowman, J., Ghere, G., Martin, C., Leon-Guerrero, R., & Sommerness, J. (2021) for the TIES Center and described in Comprehensive Inclusive Education: General Education & the Inclusive IEPis an effective way to ensure educators and parents collaborate to develop inclusive services to support the student's access and progress in the general education curriculum and on their IEP goals.
The first two steps of the IEP Planning Process involve a collaborative conversation between the general and special education teachers, the family, and related service providers to understand the family’s vision for
their child and how best to provide inclusive supports and services at school. Click here to see all four steps of this improved way of writing
IEPs.
"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."Maya Angelou.
We know better.
Do you want to keep having disjointed IEPs and disjointed pull-out services...or do you want to...
use a better approach to writing IEPs and have your child receive inclusive services developed through collaboration between you and the staff working with your child?
If you'd love some support getting your staff to be more collaborative when writing inclusive IEPs, we can talk.
Click here to pick a day and time that works for you and
we can have a chat about ways to make this school year even better for your child.
Here's to IEP teams that collaborate with each other and support students in general education classes!
P.S. What would it be like if you were invited to collaborate with the school staff before the IEP meeting
and jointly create a draft IEP instead of waiting to get a draft IEP a few days before the meeting?
Click to hear about the framework that Amy Plica, educator, parent, Founder of Universal Crossings has developed! It’s brilliant and I know you’ll want to
know more about it.
