The Mann Cave Blog

Recently, I had the opportunity to collaborate with general educators while writing an IEP for a student on my caseload and I wanted to write about the experience a little. Overall it was a very positive experience and it is something that I hope to be able to do more often going forward.

Context of Collaboration

For this IEP, I had to write goals for a student for a two subjects where I rarely observe the student. This means that I do not get to personally see their performance in class and how they are interacting with the curriculum. Instead, I had to rely on the observations of my general education colleagues in order to get a sense of the student’s achievement in the class and what their academic and social needs were in order to make progress. This assignment was very intimidating at first, but it was much more successful than I could possibly have predicted. In fact, I truly believe that this resulted in the best IEP that I have ever written.

My Process

Initially another special education colleague and I emailed our general education colleagues and asked them to fill out a shared document in order to get an idea of how the student was performing in classes. This proved to be unsuccessful as the general educators often wrote very little in the document and the information that they did provide was not really useful in writing the IEP. Some of the general educators even wrote “I do not understand what this question means” in the document.

Since the email was ineffective, I instead opted to set up a time to speak with the each of the teachers. Prior to the meetings, I set up what could have been considered a semi-structured interview protocol consisting of four questions:

• What are the student’s strengths both academically and socially?
• What areas of need does the student have? What do they need to work on?
• What academic achievements has the student made in your class? and,
• What is the student’s functional performance? What does it look like when they are participating? What supports do they benefit from and what supports do they need?

The benefit of conducting this collaboration like an semi-structured interview was that it gave my colleague and I to discuss what each question meant so that I could get the best possible information from each of the questions. The semi-structured format allowed my colleague and I have an in-depth discussion about the student and their needs while still getting all the information that is required by law to be included within an IEP. The result of these conversations was often that the general education teacher provided me with all of the information that I needed while I worded the information in a way that would be considered “correct” within the IEP. As the conversation progress, I simply wrote the information in the corresponding section of the IEP and then edited the raw information into a paragraph after the conversation concluded. The end result was an IEP that I believe truly captured the student’s performance in class, the supports that they required to be successful, and goals that addressed the most pressing needs of the student for the coming year. My hope is that this IEP will help support the student in continuing their success going forward.

Reflections

• The most prominent reflection that I had during this process is that it was apparent very early on that my general education colleagues and myself speak a very different professional language. A great example of this was when I was discussing the student’s reading ability with their English Language Arts teacher. During this discussion I asked about the student’s “decoding” ability (meaning their ability to sound out or recognize words on the page) and I had to explain to my colleague what that meant. There were several instances such as this where I either had to explain a concept that is common in special education circles (i.e., decoding, functional performance, etc.) or my colleague had to explain to me more about the specific instructional techniques they utilized or what skills they were requiring of the students. I believe that this lack of shared language is a tremendous barrier in the collaborative process. Any teachers that are looking to collaborate should make sure that this barrier is addressed.
• My general education colleagues have a great deal more expertise in their curriculum areas than I do. When I spoke with the student’s science teacher, they had to explain a chemistry concept to me in detail so that I could write an effective goal. The ELA teacher was able to speak in great detail regarding the student’s abilities in English, how they related to state standards, and what skills the student would need in order to progress in the curriculum. This resulted in the student having a goal in each subject that was not only personalized for them, but also related directly to the general curriculum (which is the idea that special educators strive for).
• This collaboration made the IEP writing much easier. Often writing an IEP feels like a heavy lift, but by writing it while having the conversation, it was much easier to come up with the language to accurate describe the student’s needs and capabilities. Because writing the document was easier, I believe that I was able to not only include more information, but also more accurate information.
• A negative to this process is that it was more time consuming and it was difficult to find a shared time for me to collaborate with my colleagues. While I think that it was a more effective process, this increased time requirement is not inconsequential. Teachers are pressed for time and completing a task quickly can often be preferable to completing it more effectively as every minute that a teacher spends on one task (in this case writing an IEP), it means that they cannot spend that minute planning, grading, or completing any of the other of myriad of responsibilities that we have. Finding a shared time when two or more teachers are able to participate in this collaboration can be difficult as well. Again, since teachers are so busy throughout the day, there may be limited opportunities throughout a school day or school week for teachers to be able to sit together and complete shared tasks.
• I would be interested to engage in this type of collaboration with a student whom I teach regularly but is a little more unfamiliar for my general education colleagues. What input would they be able to give? Would the effectiveness be there? Ideally I would love to draw on my colleague’s knowledge of standards and curriculum, but would they be able to share that expertise with student they don’t know? These are questions that I would be very eager to find answers to.