POST ONE
Special education. That phrase—even that very word, "special"—evokes conflicting perspectives, feelings, and experiences, aptly equating with the confounding reality in which special education services themselves often get delivered.
There's something cloying about the designation of "special,” as if we're trying to sell something that isn't quite what we say it is. Like calling tract housing “Castle Cliffs” or “Sunflower Symphony. Yet everyone accepts it, perhaps because it's uncomfortable to delve deeper into the term’s underlying reality.
As a special education teacher in my fifth year of teaching, I'd like to tell you exactly what special education means—except I'm not precisely sure myself. In an idealistic sense, it means that the individual needs of a student are met by the mandate of a legal document known colloquially as an IEP.
Some days, what it truly seems to entail are endless rounds of tinkering with slow and archaic software in the effort to meet state compliance percentages and ensure adequate funding. Other days, it seems to mean frustrating attempts to collaborate with a set of professionals with unclear roles and varying levels of expertise.
The one thing I can say for sure about special education is that it is something we can do better. Not better simply in terms of rates of compliance, or in terms of the phrasing of IEP goals, but better in terms of the quality and impact of services that are delivered everyday in the classroom to students with varying levels of ability, knowledge, and skills.
So I'll start by sharing with you what my colleagues and I are doing to try to make special education services better in my school, without any presumption that what I am presenting is definitive, exemplary, nor even right.
In the absence of any clear guidance in the Wild West known as special education, my hope is that by putting my own travails out there, others may benefit. Over the next few posts, I'll share some of the practices in development at my school, Jonas Bronck Academy, a public middle school in the Bronx.
I’ll begin by describing a protocol we developed to gather information about students when developing their IEP. Rather than asking each teacher to submit reports, we instead gather as a grade-level team to analyze the student’s work and develop strategies to meet his or her needs.
I’ll explain how we conduct IEP meetings, then I’ll turn my attention to the classroom and introduce a student guide I developed to help students process content and focus on activities during ELA lessons. Finally, I'll dig into a goal-setting process my school uses to address the tension between the individualized goals we set for students and the everyday reality within each classroom.
POST TWO
In my post last week, I said I would describe what my colleagues and I are doing to try to make special education services better at my school, without any presumption that what we’re doing is definitive, exemplary, or even right.
To start with, I’ll focus on the information gathering that happens before we develop a student’s individualized education program (IEP). To clarify the process of IEP development, an IEP is typically drafted by a special education teacher assigned to a student’s case (unless the case is an initial, triennial, or reevaluation, in which case it will be drafted by the school psychologist), who then meets with the parent and modifies it with his or her input.
While gathering as much information as possible before writing an IEP seems like common sense and best practice, and many schools go through this process in some form, I have encountered IEPs seemingly written with little direct knowledge of the child.
This may be due to a lack of knowledge or training on the part of the case managers. But I think it also has to do with the challenge of meeting dates of compliance for a large caseload of students with limited resources available in the school.
IEPs must be written by certain dates or compliance percentages—which affect a principal's rating—will be lowered. This bureaucratic constraint can have the effect of making teachers’ primary focus the completion of administrative tasks, rather than the creation of a high quality and accurate IEP.
The traditional method of information gathering for development of an IEP is to gather “teacher reports,” generally by placing a long, complicated form in teacher's mailboxes. The teacher checks boxes, fills in academic data from tests, grades, and scribbles in anecdotals from his or her classroom, then resubmits the form to the IEP teacher, SAT (school assessment team), or whomever is ultimately responsible for drafting the student's IEP.
Unfortunately, the information provided in a teacher report tends to be thin, not necessarily due to any fault on the teacher’s part, but because of the length and tediousness of the report.
As the special education coordinator, I am responsible for ensuring that an IEP accurately depicts the current levels of performance of a student. But teachers may not fill out the forms in a timely manner, and each teacher completing a report is working in isolation.
At first, in an effort to solve some of these problems, I took the simple step of digitizing the process. I created a Google form that dropped teacher information directly into a spreadsheet. While this made the process of gathering information more efficient, and hopefully less time-consuming for teachers, I continued to find the information often so generic as to be unusable. Sometimes, two teachers gave conflicting accounts of the same student and I needed to follow up with them individually.
I took this issue to my 8th grade team last year, and they generously volunteered to put aside time on a weekly basis for us to discuss students with upcoming IEP meetings. At first, we structured these meetings as interviews. I asked questions and recorded notes on the same teacher report form that I used to sent out individually to each teacher.
Because we were all that the same table discussing the student, I learned more about students than I would have from reading teachers’ written reports, and the information was more relevant to students’ IEPs.
However, these conversations tended to veer into general anecdotal impressions of behavior in the classroom, rather than provide insight into specific academic challenges students faced.
To make the process more concrete, we began pairing our discussion with an examination of samples of the student's work. This grounded our conversation in more concrete academic observations, while allowing us to corroborate that information with our anecdotes and observations.
My colleagues and I continue to fine-tune the protocol, which we call our Student Work Analysis Protocol. The process now includes an initial survey of any pieces of assessment data available, such as NY State Test scores over time, psychoeducational evaluations, social histories, reading assessment scores, benchmarks, attendance data, and so on.
We then correlate any evidence patterns and trends in the data with our observations of the child in each of our classrooms and content areas. Next, we examine samples of the student's work. From these observations, we generate goals targeted at student challenges and align those goals to the Common Core standards. Finally, we attempt to generate a team-wide strategy to support the student across each of our classrooms.
This protocol has been implemented in all grade level teams in my school, and because I am present as the district representative at each meeting, I can attest to the positive effect this protocol has had on the quality of our conversations with parents at students’ IEP meetings.
Now, we’re able to share with parents information that has been developed by a core team of the content area teachers who work with their children. The increased accuracy of our collective investigation lends itself to more productive conversations about concrete goals and strategies that will better meet the student's needs.
While this process is far from perfect (I'll speak more about why in a future post), it has improved the quality of the IEPs that we develop for our students. You can view the protocol here, and a copy of the Google template here that our team completes for each child during the process of the protocol. I hope you’ll consider writing a comment. I would love to hear about how your colleagues develop IEPs and get feedback on how I can make this process more effective at my school.