Today in my deaf education class, my teacher suggested the idea.ed.gov website to us. It talks about statewide and district wide assessments, early intervention, evaluation and reevaluation, funding, highly qualified teachers, etc. What I really liked about this website is that we all have enough reading to do for class, and the last thing that we want to do is a little extra reading on legislature or requirements for special educators. However, this webpage is great because it has a variety of videos that you can watch if you are really interested in these topics but don't want to take the time or energy to read about them. The link that I have provided takes you to a really cool video called "Individualized Education Plan (IEP)- Changes in Initial Evaluation and Reevaluation." This talks about implementing the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), and creating an effective IEP for your students.
Because the parents, the general education teacher, the special education teacher or provider, speech therepists, audiologists, etc. are all expected to be part of the IEP meetings, it is not impossible to think that most of us in this class will be involved in an IEP meeting at some point in our teaching career. Therefore it is important to know what will be expected of us as educators when creating an IEP. Teachers also can look at how we can create the most effective IEP for a child in this type of collaborative setting.
In my CEP 436 class today, I also learned that many teachers are encouraged to make the goals in a student's IEP as broad as possible. That way, parents cannot really gage whether or not the students have met the goals that they were expected to meet by the end of the school year. This is simply not right. As educators, we should expect more out of ourselves and our students. We should set measurable, attainable goals, and we should be constantly monitoring to see that the students are achieving these goals. If they are not, then we need to look at restructuring our teaching style to better fit the needs of the student, instead of making the goals so broad that we can't really tell if the children have met them or not.
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That is a really cool site! I hate having to read about all the legal stuff and it makes it much easier if some one is reading it to me or like on this site its in a video.
ReplyDeleteAnd along with IEP's I have seen some teachers do some crazy things on them just so the parents can't accuse them of not getting their goals done. I would think teachers would want to help their kids and not try to let them get away with not getting their goals accomplished.
I'm glad that you enjoyed the site. It's great that there are multimedia ways of finding out information nowadays. In addition, I think that you are absolutely right. Teachers should want to help their students to the greatest extent possible, and often that means holding themselves more accountable!
ReplyDeleteJenna, IEP's are a very difficult subject to tackle. You are absolutely right that some teachers, administrators, case workers, etc. misuse IEP's and do not do a quality job at writing them and/or meeting their reqirements. It is really sad that school faculity are so lazy or incabable of their jobs that they have to make broad goals so that they cannot fail at meeting them. The only reason for this is that they do not want to be under scrutiny for failure to meet the goals.
ReplyDeleteIt is up to us and other educators to use our voice and stand up to bad/lazy IEP goals. It is only hurting the students further and that is not what we are becoming teachers to do. Thank you for speaking out about this subject!
I'm really excited to check out this website. I am not much of a reader, I'd rather watch lectures and video's so I definitely think this will benefit me. I also don't know a lot about specific requirements so I can see using this site as a reference in the future.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I completely agree with your opinion on your last paragraph. As teacher's our job is to educate students so I am extremely surprised to find that teacher's are being encouraged not to do their job. If we can't even tell whether a student has learned something or not, what's the point of them even coming to school? I definitely agree that we need to make goals that students can reach.
It's good to hear that there are so many students in this class who are prepared to set high standards for their students and make sure that they are met. You three are going to be some of the good teacher out there, and as a result, your students are going to be the ones that are successful. The four of us may be successful in spite of bad teachers, but special needs students will only be successful because of good ones!
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