A Seasoned Master Teacher Uses Goals in Toolkit
Using Goalbook to Write IEPs and Guide New Teachers
Gwen Howard has been teaching for 33 years in a remote rural community that struggles to recruit and retain Special Education teachers. For that reason, the school she works at now has tasked her with the lofty responsibility of writing IEPs for a group of new teachers that she is mentoring. She works with students from pre-k to grade 12. Read about how she uses Goalbook’s resources to empower new teachers to write effective IEPs!
Gwen’s immense workload is balanced by her core philosophy about IEPs.
Because Gwen’s role isn’t a traditional Sped Teacher role, she doesn’t have a specific number of students on her caseload. Her workload is continuously growing and evolving as new students come in through the early intervention program and new teachers either excel and take on more of their own IEP writing OR struggle and need more support from her.
Within the first month of the school year, she completed at least ten amendments and four Evaluation Summary Reports (ESR) and she doesn’t see the volume of work decreasing anytime soon.
What keeps her grounded is her goal of ensuring that IEPs are compliant and actionable for all staff that work with students with special needs. She believes if she can help IEPs make sense for all parties involved, then all students will succeed.
The core functions of her role are quite clear:
· Write rigorous and compliant IEPs
· Mentor new SPED teachers
But, as straightforward as those responsibilities may sound, there is a lot that goes into doing both functions effectively. To understand what those core functions actually look like for Gwen, we have to understand her core philosophy on the role of the IEP Document and the role of the SPED teacher in its implementation.
The two principles of Gwen’s core philosophy:
- The IEP Document must be functional
- Strategic collaboration is critical to success
Teaching her mentees the power of collaboration leads to actionable goals.
Gwen sees the IEP as a living document that is shared and strengthened by active collaboration. In mentoring new sped teachers, she leads with the importance of collaboration with related service providers and Gen Ed Teachers. For example, one of the IEPs that she is writing is for a student who is visually impaired, prior to selecting Blind VI goals in Goalbook, she encourages her mentee to reach out to the vision specialist. After consulting with the specialist, if there is a goal in Toolkit that aligns with their recommendation, then it should be used to augment the recommended goal.
She wants her mentees to know that they don’t have to be experts in domain knowledge, especially when they have resources in other professionals around them. However, they should be experts when it comes to unifying ideas and a team's core strengths to create serviceable goals.
In another example of the importance of collaboration, Gwen encourages one of her mentees to write goals that can be easily executed in the gen-ed classroom as well as during pull-out time.
“I also want the teachers that I mentor to write the IEPs in a way that can be implemented in a gen-ed teacher’s classroom. If their students spend a significant amount of time in the gen-ed class, they should be working on their goals in there too. This is also helpful for creating present levels. Of course, the SPED teacher is going to be doing their own observations but it’s important to combine their notes with the observations of the Gen-ed teacher.”
This is simple advice that is often overlooked, goals should be written so that everyone who works with the student should be able to execute on them in their spaces on campus.
Goals in Toolkit are a guide; they’re only effective when a teacher adjusts them for real contexts.
One of Gwen’s mentees implemented a kindergarten math goal that had a strategy that required manipulatives: Represent Objects with Written Numerals. The embedded strategy in the goal mentions ice trays for sorting objects and the mentee teacher searched everywhere to find ice trays. The problem? The community that the school is in is so remote rural that ice trays weren’t items that were readily available for him to purchase. When she finally met with him and discovered all the time he had spent searching for ice trays, she gave him some simple advice:
“Egg Cartons will work.”
This conversation exemplifies Gwen’s two points in her core philosophy. First, the IEP must be functional. The goals in Toolkit are meant to be a guide not a plug-and-play solution. This is why every goal statement and every present levels statement in Goalbook toolkit are completely editable. This ensures that the goal works for the specific context that it is being used.
Second, connecting with teachers and asking them what resources they use would have been the logical first step. As a sped teacher it can be easy to fall into insular work patterns, especially if there aren’t other people with your role on campus but leaning into collaboration helps take the goals in Goalbook Toolkit to the next level for students.
For Gwen, Goalbook isn’t an expedient nor is it a crutch. It is a tool that she pairs with her 3 decades of experience to make a positive impact on the community she works in.
*All names have been changed to protect the identities of the students and educators.
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