Intro:


With increased pressure to meet academic standards, Special Ed professionals are wondering how to develop meaningful goals and objectives that address the individual needs of the student WHILE addressing on-grade-level skills.

The Facts:


  • NCLB says that all students must function on grade level by 2014
  • The state tells us that 98% of SpEd students will be testing on level by next year and that the IEPs must match the testing level
  • Questions you are probably having:
  • Doesn’t this imply that I should use grade-level TEKS on student’s IEPs?
  • If they could master TEKS on-grade-level, wouldn’t they be sent back to GenEd?
  • Isn’t it inappropriate to use objectives that I KNOW the student cannot master?
  • How do I navigate between these two opposing forces???


    IDEA says that an IEP…

    “…must meet the child’s needs that result from the child’s disability to enable the child to be involved in and make progress in the general education curriculum; and (B) meet each of the child’s other educational needs that result from the child’s disability…”

    Let’s Break this down:


    “…must meet the child’s needs that result from the child’s disability…”

    TRANSLATION: Students’ IEP must be based on the student’s present levels of academic achievement and functional performance (not their chronological grade level)

    “…to enable the child to be involved in and make progress in the general education curriculum…”

    TRANSLATION: nothing here says ‘on-grade-level’. It says they must make progress in the General Curriculum (in Texas, the TEKS). By using a functional assessment that is aligned to the TEKS, a teacher will yield both of the above pieces of information; what the child’s needs are, and if the IEP is based on that, the student will make progress in the general curriculum.

    So the question is, how do I create an IEP that is a legitimately helpful teaching tool while including on-grade-level objectives?

    The simple answer is to give the student one or two on-level objectives, whether they are CLASS objectives or TEKS, then give them related functional level objectives that the student can actually master and make progress on.

    Explanation:


    TEKS and CLASS are both spiraling curricula, which means that we hit the same skill group year after year, increasing the complexity level each year. Think of math, first we do number awareness and simple numeration. That grows into simple addition. Then subtraction and so forth. What is multiplication but addition in groups.

    So that said, give the CLASS test at a functioning level. The student will miss some items and master some items. Target the missed items on the IEP and then add some objectives on-grade-level for the areas in which the student showed mastery. They can and will make progress and you still have your CLASS test as documentation for the objectives you choose. The student is making progress in the General Curriculum.

    An Alternative / Supporting Method:

    Give the student the on-grade-level state standard (derived from state testing) as a goal statement, and then select as objectives those pre-requisite skills that the CLASS tests pinpointed. Print the IEP with the objective codes suppressed. (by clicking on MISCELLANEOUS > PREFERENCES > REPORTS and make sure 'Print TEKS Objective IDs Only' is checked off) The student will make progress toward mastery of the state standards, and will have a positive outcome on his progress report – both per grading period and school year.

    ILLUSTRATIONS:

    Here we choose on-grade-level TEKS objectives derived from state testing. In addition to TEKS objectives, we also selected pre-requisite CLASS skills for the student's actual functioning level as determined by the CLASS test they took.

     

    Next we save the changes and print the IEP report. Before clicking 'OK' to print you must first click on 'REPORT OPTIONS' and make sure you have the same boxes selected as we have depicted below.

     

    Finally, this is what the IEP will print. Notice that we have on-grade-level objectives on their IEP and we have prerequisites that they can actually master!

     

    UPDATE: We recorded a training video which covers this very topic. You can access it through the Download Center by logging in and clicking on 'TRAINING' - then locating it from the list. You can Log In Here.