Individualized Educational Plan
Tips to ensure a successful IEP plan.
IEP is a collaborative journey.
Every tasty dish requires several ingredients, similarly, in order for a student to have a successful academic journey, several ingredients are necessary. Every student requires a support team; this includes: the student, their family member(s), educators and services if necessary. Here are several tips to ensure your IEP experience is the best your child’s school has to offer.
Attached, you will find a copy of your form.
Successful IEP Tips
1.In addition to parents, students, can be valuable members of the IEP team.
2.As you participate in IEP conferences and collaboratively developed goals and objectives you should always consider how the goals and objectives that you recommend will advance equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living and economic self-sufficiency.
3.Some students who do not qualify for coverage under IDEA do qualify under Section 504. You may be involved in developing a 504 plan for these students rather than an IEP.
4.The IEP team must design an IEP that ensures that the student will be involved in and make progress in the general education curriculum, and it must do so by addressing the student’s education and education-related needs.
5As a member of the IEP team, you and your colleagues must identify the supplementary aids and services the student needs to be involved and make progress in the general education curriculum.
6.The IEP team is responsible for making placement decision. Although IDEA allows placement across several settings, it presumes, as you must, that students will be educated in the general education classroom and will participate in the extracurricular and other school activities with their nondisabled peers.
7.During the IEP conference, the results of nondiscriminatory evaluations should be summarized and serve as the basis of planning each student’s individualized program.
8.At the IEP conference, you should develop a discipline plan for a student who needs one, and you should make the plan culturally appropriate.
9.At the IEP conference, you must comply with IDEA by communicating with student’s parents in their preferred language, which may ne their native language.
10.When school social workers and school counselors are members of the IEP team, you can partner with them to identify how schools can reduce the educational challenges facing students experiencing poverty.
11.As you develop a partnership, ask the family member who is most accessible to you whether there are other family members who they want you to include as partners in IEP development and implementation.
12.When you contact parents to invite them to the IEP conference, you can tell them about the resources of the parent training and information center in your state and encourage them to gather information from the center about IEP conferences, if they believe that it would be helpful to have this information in advance.
13.During an IEP conference, ask the student’s parent’s if they want suggestions about how to help the student with homework. Don’t presume that they do or do not provide that assistance.
14.The IEP should address a student’s emotional and social needs, not just the student’s academic needs.
15.Teachers have opportunities at IEP conferences to learn more about the natures of different assessments and to have questions answered about how to assessment links to classroom instruction.
16.Differentiated instruction is a good strategy for all students, not just students with learning disabilities, so you should almost always consider it when developing an IEP.
17. Unless everyone on a student's IEP team has heard the student try to communicate, team members would be wise to observe him or her before drafting the IEP.
18. As helpful as school-based assessment is, the IEP team should be also consider conducting home-and community-based assessment to gain a thorough understanding of how the student communicates.
19.The IEP team will want the student to learn strategies and used augmented communications systems that will allow him or her to communicate with teachers, family and peers at school.
20. The IEP should specify that every professional who works with a student who uses an AAC or other device should learn how to operate the AAC or other device.
21.During IEP meetings, you should address the specific strengths, needs, and preferences of students who experience depression in order to ensure a positive school environment.
22. Complex behaviors and problems often require complex solutions. It’s likely that no single intervention will be sufficient for students with EBD, so you and your colleagues on the IEP team should use multicomponent interventions.
23. If a student is prone to conflict, you should make sure that the student’s IEP includes strategies to teach the student social problem-solving and anger-management skills.
24. The IEP document should address needs and strengths related to behavioral, social, and emotional characteristics, as well as academic needs.
25. Similar to IEP meetings, 504 planning meetings are very helpful in terms of preparing teachers to provide appropriate accommodations.
26. The IEP team should remember that, in most cases, medication alone is insufficient to effectively change behavior. In addition to medication, students with ADHD need instruction on how to self-regulate their actions and learn more effectively as well as how to set and attain goals.
27. When you and your colleagues develop an IEP for a student with an intellectual disability, you will want to consider carefully her home and community environments and teach skills that enable the student to be effective in them. This is because the student needs to her home and community environments and to adapt to them. To know about those environments, you need to learn from the student’s parents; their participation in the IEP conferences is essential.
28. When there is an obvious connection or even a suspicion of a connection between the student’s intellectual and adaptive functioning and risk factors such as inadequate nutrition, health care, and rest, you and related service providers(such as school social worker) should connect the student’s family to appropriate school and community resources.
29. Although involving adults support provider, such as potential employers in transitions planning is a good idea at any time during secondary education, it is especially important for students ages sixteen through twenty-one so that their community-based instruction curriculum becomes embedded in their community.
Email: deangela.brown@sccpss.com
Location: 15 Blueridge Avenue, Savannah, GA, United States
Phone: 912-395-6380