A Speech and Language Pathologist’s Journey with Goalbook
Using Toolkit goals as a related service provider.
A speech and language pathologist with an immense caseload is hesitant to use Goalbook to draft goals. Eventually, she embraces Toolkit as her primary source for IEP goals. Read about her journey and the process she developed to write foundational goals for her students!
Shelby struggles to manage her caseload and other responsibilities.
Shelby Adams is a speech and language pathologist for a school in Michigan. Her challenge? She has a large caseload and she is responsible for writing IEPs, delivering therapy services, benchmarking, and progress monitoring for all her students. On top of all that, she was instrumental in helping develop a system that lessens over/misidentification of students with special needs, which she actively manages. She also has lunch duty every day! To say she is busy would be an understatement.
Shelby has worked at her school for the past six years, and her current caseload is comprised of 52 elementary school students. This number is actually down from the upwards of 70 students that she’s had on her caseload in the past. This is partially due to the initiative around tightening up the process of identifying students with special needs, and her use of Goalbook Toolkit goals and progress monitoring resources.
Using Goalbook Toolkit for goals wasn’t Shelby’s first choice.
Shelby hasn’t always used Goals in Toolkit. Her school has had Goalbook for the past two years but it wasn’t until this school year that she actually decided to start using it to write her IEPs. She wasn't hesitant to use Goalbook because she didn’t receive training, in fact, everyone at her school with an account received training. It wasn’t because Goalbook Toolkit didn’t have goals in her subject area, goals in Toolkit cover 17 unique subject, behavior, and disability areas including Speech and Language.
She was hesitant because she knows her students and wasn’t sold on the idea that the goals in Toolkit would match the quality of her goals written based on the real relationships that she had. It was a belief that she had that held her back, not the reality of the resources in Toolkit. In effect, she was satisfied with her existing practice and wasn’t convinced Toolkit was for her.
As with many educators, her decision to make a change was at the crossroad between sustainability and quality instruction/service delivery. Her immense caseload made it near impossible to find the time to write IEPs at the level of quality that she knew would lead to success for her students.
This wasn’t a matter of whether or not Shelby was capable of writing high-quality goals, it was a simple matter of not having enough time in the day to do so from scratch. Time isn’t a luxury many public school related service providers or teachers have but Shelby wasn’t willing to sacrifice quality for lack of time.
Shelby realized using Toolkit didn’t mean compromising quality.
The summer between the ‘20-’21 and ‘21-’22 school years was when Shelby sat down and really took the time to explore goals in Toolkit in depth. She’d seen them demoed before at training and she knew some of her colleagues had used them, but this was the first time she attempted to connect Goalbook’s resources to her students.
What she discovered was Goalbook Toolkit isn’t simply a repository of goals, it is a research-based tool that provides IEP statements and instructional resources that educators can customize to fit their students' needs. Those two keys were what Shelby needed in order to continue to grow and thrive as a Speech and Language Pathologist:
- She needed research-based, highly effective goals.
- She needed the goals to be specific to her students’ needs.
“Self-development made me change the way I write IEPs and use Goalbook” — Shelby Adams, Speech and Language Pathologist
Using Toolkit has optimized Shelby’s planning process.
She has since developed a process for IEP writing where she collects relevant goals in student libraries during one work session and then culls down the collected goals to the most impactful goals in another work session.
This year, Shelby works with a second-grade student named Sean who is on the autism spectrum and has some speech and language needs. During her initial work session to collect goals for him, she looks at goals in both the autism section and the speech and language section. She then gathers the eight goals below in Sean’s student library folder.
- Requesting Items from Peers
- Use Frequently Occurring Adjectives to Describe Pictures or Objects
- Identify On-topic Conversation
- Formulating Sentences to Describe a Short Story
- Working with Peers
- Recognizing Emotions
- Stay on Topic During Conversation
- Resolving Conflict with Peers
After saving all the goals in the library, Shelby puts down her computer and reflects on which goals will be the highest impact RIGHT NOW versus goals that Sean has time to develop in the future.
With the collected goals organized in the library, she spends time reflecting independently and collaborating with Sean’s social worker and other teachers to make sure there isn’t too much overlap with the other goals on his IEP.
After this process she selects three goals to work on with Sean this year that address pragmatics for Speech and Language and barriers presented by autism:
For Shelby, just because she selected three goals to add to the IEP right now, doesn’t mean the other five aren’t important.
“I leave all the goals I selected in the library folder just in case I need to make adjustments this year and it also means I’m prepared for next year…” — Shelby Adams, Speech and Language Pathologist
Shelby finds and customizes “high impact goals” for her students.
The Goal Page entitled Stay on Topic During a Conversation is a goal that helps Sean with the grade 2 developmental goal of Using social awareness and interpersonal skills to establish and maintain positive relationships. It also helps him meet the benchmark of Using communication skills to interact effectively with others.
Even though Shelby selected this goal by filtering with the Autism category, she felt that it was a strong goal that addressed pragmatics for both Speech and Language and Autism. In her mind, this makes it a high-impact goal for Sean because it builds a broad but firm foundation for his social communication.
On the goal page, Shelby can see how these skills are developed over time and what they look like at different grade levels using the standard staircase located on the right side of the page. She can also calibrate the goal text to match Sean’s level of need by toggling between the mild, moderate, and intense levels of support.
If you have students with speech goals, please explore the speech and language section of goals in Toolkit today!
*All names have been changed to protect the identities of the students and educators.
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