If you take nothing else from my website, take this.

My personal pet peeve? The phrase “In 36 instructional weeks.” I hate that. It’s pretentious and gives parents no idea when they can expect to receive formal progress monitoring.

In my district, we present formal progress monitoring at the end of each 9-week grading period. The school calendar for my district is posted over a year in advance. Seems like a “no brainer” to hop onto the PDF of that calendar and figure out when the end of each grading period will fall, then use the month/year for the end of the grading period instead.

Let’s say I have an IEP meeting and initiate new goals in November. I know that my first formal progress monitoring will happen in mid-December at the end of second quarter. When I go to write my benchmarks, I wouldn’t write, “At the end of 9 instructional weeks.” First of all, there are only four instructional weeks between now and when my monitoring is due (basic math can be hard, but COME ON, right?).

Secondly, it just sounds unnecessarily convoluted. I would, instead, write “By mid-December 2016.” That lets parents know when to start checking the backpack or mailbox, and sounds far less stuffy (passes the “stranger test). I would also make sure, as I wrote the benchmarks for that goal, that I took into account that there would only be four weeks between the initiation of that goal and would make sure my benchmark for the first benchmark reporting period was appropriate for the short time frame.