Special Education
Individual Education Planning for Students with Special Needs
ESTABLISHING AND IMPLEMENTING GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
Identify priorities
Based on the information gathered and shared by IEP team members, the team can determine the student's strengths, needs and interests, and from these can clarify priorities.
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Determine goals and break them down into objectives
Long-term goals address the prioritized needs of the student and indicate the trend (e.g., increase, improve) in learning the student is expected to demonstrate.
Goals should:
- challenge the student but be achievable
- be relevant to the individual student's actual needs
- focus on what will be learned rather than what will be taught
- be stated positively, i.e., state what the student will do.
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The core of the plan develops as the goals are broken down into short-term objectives. These represent intermediate steps between the student's present level of performance and the established goals for the student. They are the specific statements which describe observable, measurable behaviours and provide indicators of student progress.
As a teacher, you may wish to consider the following steps when writing objectives:
- identify the various steps involved in achieving the intended goals
- organize the tasks into sequential components
- screen out unnecessary steps and focus on essential components
- describe how the student can demonstrate that the objective has been achieved.
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The IEP team should reach consensus on a manageable number of goals and objectives for the student, and assign responsibility for their implementation to individual members.
Parents have the right to be consulted in the process of determining the educational goals and services provided for their children. However, they also have to recognize the teacher's right to exercise professional judgment in providing instruction to students. If a parent feels that the decisions of an employee of the school board negatively affect the education, health or safety of a student, the parent of the student may, after discussing those concerns with school and district administrators, formally appeal those decisions to the Board of Trustees.
Determine instructional and assessment strategies and identify required resources
Team members implementing the various objectives should determine the strategies that they will be using and the resources needed for the student to achieve the objectives.
The Integrated Resource Packages (IRPs), along with the annotations published by the Ministry, provide a wealth of information on recommended learning resources. Alternate formats such as Braille, large print, closed captioning , and audiotaping should be made available where students require them. In many cases, provincially recommended resources are already available in alternate formats, or assistance is available in reformatting them. Teachers may wish to ensure that the local acquisition of learning resources includes provincially recommended or locally evaluated titles from several of the following media: software, video, print, manipulatives and optical formats such as CD-ROM and laser discs.
Instruction and assessment should be considered together. These procedures can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the instructional plan and the strategies used as well as provide an indication of student progress. If the student is progressing slowly toward the stated objectives, alternate instructional strategies should be employed before revisions to the goals and objectives are made. If the use of various teaching strategies and resources fails to result in satisfactory progress by the student, the IEP team should then consider revising the goals and/or objectives initially set for the student.
