There’s this idea floating around that if a kid isn’t “college material,” we should just push them into the trades. After all, trades are supposed to be the easier, more practical option, right? It’s a convenient way to shuffle struggling students off the academic path and into something “hands-on,” but let’s be real: this mentality […]
Category Archives: IEPs
Writing effective goals, progress monitoring, and understanding best practice when completing paperwork for students with behavioral challenges
I’m YouTube Famous(ish)!
I am excited to announce that I have recorded enough voice-overs for the Adapted Literature books to start an Enraged2Engaged YouTube channel! I feel extremely fortunate to have friends and co-workers to add their uniqne voices for these modified texts. It is always gratifying to work with a team and bring new materials into the […]
Data Collection Forms
It has long been a source of fury for me when students are moved to more restrictive settings without reliable data or without having tried every reasonable intervention to allow them to remain in the least restrictive educational setting. I’ve seen firsthand how it can turn a kid’s world upside down to be removed from […]
“I Have a Rubric For That!”
Teachers asked, and I listened. They asked for easy-to-use rubrics for tracking the SECD standards aligned to each lesson in the E2E curriculum…and I made them! Frankly, this has been a gap in my curriculum that I’m ecstatic to have finally filled. It was a ton of work to go through the standards from the […]
New Qualitative Data Form!
I stepped outside of my comfort zone this week and created a new, customized form to get some “big picture,” qualitative data on a student. I really like clean, unambiguous data, but even I know that qualitative (descriptive) data has its place. I’ve written before about the way the pendulum in education tends to swing […]
“The Birds and The Bees” of Behavior Eligibility for Administrators
Administrators have to oversee a lot of stuff. So, when some kid is wrecking havoc on the school, things tend to get pretty bad before anyone moves forward with getting the kid evaluated, mostly because the process is confusing and there’s nobody who really knows that to do in most buildings. I was writing a […]
Little Boxes
If you watched the Showtime series, Weeds, you’re familiar with Malvina Reynolds’s song, Little Boxes. Data collection sheets, like the suburbs, are full of little boxes. However, unlike in the suburbs, it’s not acceptable for the little boxes to be all the same. Data collection is a highly personal–I daresay intimate–process. Everybody’s looking for a shortcut for amazing […]
Wake Up, Roosters! It’s Morning!
I write this as I sit outside the locked school at 6:02am. I can’t believe I’m here before the cross country coach. I’ve got at 6:30am parent meeting to discuss a student’s pending reevaluation. This kid has been having a rough time, even by my behavior classroom’s standards. I know that the kid’s mom doesn’t […]
“Who Gives a Final in Social Skills?!?”
Pfft. That one’s easy to answer: every single teacher who works in a school that requires all credit courses to culminate in a final exam. That’s who. School districts aren’t too keen on ideas like “the real benchmark of a student’s success will come not in the classroom, but in the corridors outside of it.” […]
#2: Intake Interviews (aka. Being Pecked to Death By Chickens)
***This is the second in a series of blog posts about the process Jenny and I are using as we prepare to set up a new district high school center for EBD transition services in our school district in August 2016. Everybody in this line of work knows what it’s like to get a move-in […]
