TSBVI Active Learning Study Group November 10, 2016 3:00 p.m. CT ****************DISCLAIMER!!!**************** THE FOLLOWING IS AN UNEDITED ROUGH DRAFT TRANSLATION FROM THE CART PROVIDER'S OUTPUT FILE. THIS TRANSCRIPT IS NOT VERBATIM AND HAS NOT BEEN PROOFREAD. THIS IS NOT A LEGAL DOCUMENT. THIS FILE MAY CONTAIN ERRORS. THIS TRANSCRIPT MAY NOT BE COPIED OR DISSEMINATED TO ANYONE UNLESS PERMISSION IS OBTAINED FROM THE HIRING PARTY. SOME INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN MAY BE WORK PRODUCT OF THE SPEAKERS AND/OR PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS AMONG PARTICIPANTS. HIRING PARTY ASSUMES ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR SECURING PERMISSION FOR DISSEMINATION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT AND HOLDS HARMLESS TEXAS CLOSED CAPTIONING FOR ANY ERRORS IN THE TRANSCRIPT AND ANY RELEASE OF INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN. *********DISCLAIMER!!!************ Transcript Start [Music] Fade up from black. Animation: Text for TSBVI transform into braille cells for TSBVI. [Music face out] Fade to black. TSBVI Active Learning Study Group November 10, 2016 3:00 p.m. CT ****************DISCLAIMER!!!**************** THE FOLLOWING IS AN UNEDITED ROUGH DRAFT TRANSLATION FROM THE CART PROVIDER'S OUTPUT FILE. THIS TRANSCRIPT IS NOT VERBATIM AND HAS NOT BEEN PROOFREAD. THIS IS NOT A LEGAL DOCUMENT. THIS FILE MAY CONTAIN ERRORS. THIS TRANSCRIPT MAY NOT BE COPIED OR DISSEMINATED TO ANYONE UNLESS PERMISSION IS OBTAINED FROM THE HIRING PARTY. SOME INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN MAY BE WORK PRODUCT OF THE SPEAKERS AND/OR PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS AMONG PARTICIPANTS. HIRING PARTY ASSUMES ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR SECURING PERMISSION FOR DISSEMINATION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT AND HOLDS HARMLESS TEXAS CLOSED CAPTIONING FOR ANY ERRORS IN THE TRANSCRIPT AND ANY RELEASE OF INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN. *********DISCLAIMER!!!************ Chapter 1. Housekeeping >> Okay. Hi, everyone, I'm Charlotte Cushman here with my friend and colleague Kate Hurst. Kate: Hi, everyone. >> I hope you're not disappointed I'm not Matt Schultz, who's listed as being here. I figured I wouldn't be able to fool you for long. We're so glad to have you here today. It's so much fun to look at the chat window and see where people are from. I lost track after a while, there were so many people. We've got people from all over the United States, Alaska, to Louisiana, Maine to North Carolina, and I saw that our friends from Australia are here. And who knows what time it is there right now. But we're glad you could be here. Always glad to see our Canadian neighbors, Ontario, Nova Scotia, probably more. So, welcome. Please do write in the chat where you're from. We love to try and keep track of how our community keeps growing, so very exciting. So, welcome, everyone. >> Australia. >> All right. We're delighted that you could be with us today. We know that most of you  many of you are teachers, or administrators, or whatever you're doing we know you've got a big case load and a lot of responsibility, so thanks for making time to be with us. We have also with us, Patty Obrzut, who is here. She'll be chiming in later on. But she is from Michigan, from the Penrickton Center for Blind Children, and Matt Schultz is not with us in person today, but we're so glad that he has been with us in past webinars and will be back with us again in the future. I wanted to remind folks about the webinar dates. This is number two of our fivepart series. If anyone did not join us for number one, that is archived, been recorded and is archived, and you can find it on the active learning space and hopefully you know about that already. But we'll be sharing that URL with you as we go along. Anyway, coming up, as you can see, part three will be on January 26th, part four on March 30th and part five on May 25th. I just wanted to be sure to remind people that you need to register separately for each webinar. So just because you're here today doesn't mean that we know about you for the future sessions. So please do remember that. And also our apologies for anyone who was not able to get the handouts quickly. I know a couple of you had been in touch and had not gotten the message. We had some large files that went out with the handouts and not everybody's email server allows that. So hopefully if you're here you figured it out. But just so next time you know that might be an issue. I would also like to talk a little bit about submitting questions. If you do have any questions, you're welcome to put anything in the chat box. I think the chat box has been very active today, and just a parentheses there, we did open two different Adobe Connect rooms because we weren't sure how many folks were going to be here today. We could only fit a hundred people in each room. But so far we're still under that number. But if you're in the second room, there are a few people over there. We invite you to join everybody in the first chat room because there's more activity going on over there. So Kate is putting those links in the chat window and you can see it. So, back to the questions. You can post something in the chat box, but you can also submit a question privately if it's something you're embarrassed to ask. You're welcome to go ahead and start a private chat with the host with myself or with Kate. What I would say to that, I think, again, as teachers we know there's no such thing as a stupid question. If you're thinking and wondering something, chances are that somebody else has the same question, so please do go ahead and ask. I also wanted to talk to people about our newsletter. And we have a slide about that just to remind people about subscribing to our mailing list. The Active Learning Space is a website that I think Kate's going to put that URL right there in the  she has put it for the webinars, but she's going to give you the URL so you can click right on it. Active Learning Space we're going to be referring to throughout this webinar today, but I wanted just to alert people to the fact that there's a place to sign up on our mailing list there. And the mailing list is something that's really just for us. We don't share it with anyone. But we would like to have a way to stay in touch with people. And our goal is to try to send out an enewsletter once a month just to let you know if there's something new on the site. Specifically we have a lot of videos, and as they're posted we want to let you know about those. We don't need a lot of information, just your email address and name is all we need. Okay. Next, I want to talk about Dropbox. This is a little bit of a large topic, but basically what we've discussed is that some people have wanted to share, maybe videos of students using the Active Learning approach, sample IEP goals, case studies. And we want to be sure that you have a way to be able to share very large files. So that's why we've set up the Dropbox. We have two different links which you can see on the screen now. And one is if you don't have a Dropbox account, it's just a URL so that you can share a file with everyone. If you only want to view the files and you're not really interested in sharing them, you can use the second link. At the moment there are some videos in there of some classrooms using an Active Learning approach. A school in Australia has generously shared quite a few photos, and it might be interesting for people to see what kind of setup they have. But we just ask you to be respectful. It's physically possible for you to download things, but just to keep in mind that even though we have permission  the teacher and people who posted these have permissions in place  we ask that you not share these widely. You can show a paraprofessional or a parent or something like that, but not to do more than that. Really it's for the people in this group. Our goal is to really look at those as time goes along and find some things that we'd like to maybe organize or use in future webinars, or maybe add to the website. So we invite you to send anything. And we always love seeing new ideas pop up in there, so don't be shy about that. Next, I'd like to talk a little bit about the questions that have been submitted in the past. And we have a slide about that as well. We, last time, had asked people at the end of the last session to please go ahead and submit a question. And we've been thrilled to see how many questions have come in. It's exciting for lots of reasons, mostly just to know that we're a large community. And also to see some of the responses that are coming in that Kate and Patty and I have been trying to respond, but it's wonderful when you respond to each other, because there really isn't a right or wrong answer on a lot of these. It's really a place for discussion. Kate: Yes. Charlotte: This is what I tried, it may or may not work, what about you, do you have a way you would've done it with an older student. Or I'm an itinerant teacher, what I'm doing is different than you, you're schoolbased. So everything is great and we're glad to have everything in there. So please do keep submitting. Kate: And I just have to say, you know, we each come with our open particular expertise. You know, Charlotte is a teacher of the visually impaired. My background is in deafness. Patty's is as an OT. We have a different perspective we bring into this, and I think sharing our thoughts, giving feedback from our own expertise is really beneficial. And I feel personally I've gained a lot of insight to my own practice from having other people's feedback on what I'm doing. And I think that's a nice thing to have. We work in such isolation most of the time, it's nice to be able to get feedback from our colleagues. So we encourage you to keep doing that. Charlotte: I agree. The questions can be anything, where do you find a particular material? Oftentimes that's something you are going to know best. Maybe you found a particular toy you love that's really motivating to your students. And our hope with that is also  because there are a lot of questions at this point. Our hope is to organize those into topic areas or frequently asked questions, kind of distilling the nuggets, if you will, so that people will be able to search for information more easily. So keep those questions coming right there on the website, and we'll try to answer them as quickly as we can. Sometimes it takes us a couple days, but we are mindful when they come in. So, speaking of questions, we have a slide with a question. Charlotte: Kate, I'm glad you mentioned that, because I had another piece of housekeeping that I wanted to try to remember to tell people, namely that it's really important for you to submit your signin sheet. Not everybody was clear about the function of that. But the function of the signin sheet is it's a way we take attendance. Once we get your signin sheet that's how we'll know to send you an evaluation. So people have been wondering about attendance and evaluation. All of that hinging on the signin sheet, so please be sure you do get that in. I think that's it for housekeeping. Any more details? Kate: Some of you have mentioned that you're having trouble getting some of the content if you're on an iPad. I think it is hard to download the handouts. They should've been mailed to you this morning. If you did not get them, we'll resend them after the webinar. As soon as I can get through, I'll resend them again. And also I'll resend the signin sheet. That way if for whatever reason you can't get to the one in our files pod, you can get it then and just submit it to us. I hope that will work. I know Denise, you said you were having a little bit of trouble. I hope that will work for you. Okay. Charlotte: And related to that, if anybody is having difficulties getting on today, or I know there's one person, Ellen, who's at the airport. If you have to get in an airplane in the middle of the presentation, we do understand that you're going to need to turn off, unplug. But this is going to be recorded. It is being recorded and will be archived and posted on our Active Learning site. So you'll be able to view it later, or share it with colleagues. Kate: Yeah, great. Chapter 2. Sample Question & Response Charlotte: Okay. Now we're ready to move. Kate: Let's get rolling. Charlotte: To one of our sample questions. Kate: And actually  yeah. I'm sorry. Charlotte: So this question comes from Susan. It says I have a student who is visually impaired, but who also has other limitations such as fine motor control. If he cannot grasp and select an object to explore, how can I still implement the principles of active learning without making the choice for him, which is what I would be doing by placing an object in his hand? So, before I let Kate respond to that, this is an example of a really fabulous question, because who among us has not had that exact same quandary, you know? If I'm making the decision, then that kind of changes everything. So I think Kate's going to respond to that for us. Kate: Well, one of the things  one of the reasons we picked to share Susan's question, besides it being just a good question, is that we have the perfect answer actually on the Active Learning site. And we're going to go there now and take a look at an answer. And this is from Patty Obrzut. We were lucky to be able to drag her into the studio, trap her for a couple days, and record information from her. Here's Patty's answer to that question. Kate: It's under the active learning principles. Charlotte: This is actually good, because it gives you all a chance to see how we navigate the site. And you can find this on your own at a later time. Kate: So it's under... Active Learning principles, and it should be Patty Obrzut Discusses the Dynamic Learning Circle. Are you finding that, Nathan? [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End >> Patty Obrzut, Assistant Director of  the Penrickton Center for Blind Children discusses Stage Two of the Dynamic Learning Circle and how to present an object for a child to interact with, regardless of dexterity. [ Video end: ] Kate: That answered your question, Susan, because once you get that child engaged in that object, over time if you have the right objects in there, they will begin to develop that grasp and then grasp and release, and improve the quality of their grasp over time as well. But I think, you know, that part when Patty talks about you just get it up there and you let that child do whatever they can with the object, and it's going to stay there and it's not going to disappear, because it's either tied with an elastic or you're holding it for the child  you're going to see this happening in an activity later on in our session today. But it's that whole deal of taking the child where they are, letting them do what they can do with the object, and they will naturally advance to being able to do more complicated fine motor skills on their own. Any other thoughts, Charlotte or Patty? Charlotte: I think Patty may have something to say, but absolutely. I agree, Kate. I think remembering that it doesn't have to be a particular little room, a particular setup. It could be as simple as holding it there. I think a lot of times people think, oh, I can't do Active Learning because I don't have the right setup. Well, if you have something like a wire whisk or whatever and you can hold it there, you've got the right setup. So, good to remember. Kate: Great. Chapter 3. From Assessment to IEP Development Okay. So last week when we visited with you guys, one of the things you said is that you wanted part of our Active Learning study group to be more of a presentation from us. And so we're going to move into our prerecorded segment of the broadcast and begin to take a look at how we go from assessment to IEP development. So, Nathan, if you would move us to that portion, our prerecorded portion. Today we are going to take a look at the process of developing an individual education program for a student. And one of the things we know here in the state is that we have some specific requirements that we have to meet. IDEA, NCLB, requires that students who take an alternative assessment based on modified academic achievement standards such as the ones that our students take, must have access to and instruction in gradelevel content. We also know that regulations require the goals to be both functional and academic. In your handout you will find a link to a document, standard spaced individualized education program examples written by Marla Davis in 2007 as part of Project forum from the National Association of State Directors of Special Education. It talks about seven steps to developing a standardsbased IEP. Step one says we should consider gradelevel content. In your handout you have a link as well as the contents of a PDF file containing a letter from the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Education, Michael, and the Director of the Office of Special Education Programs, Melody Musgrove, written in November of 2015. This letter is meant to guide us in the development of IEP goals related to the state's standard curriculum for students in special education. On page 4 of this letter we read, based on the interpretation of general education curriculum set forth in this letter, we expect annual IEP goals to be aligned with state academic content standards for the grade in which the child is enrolled. This alignment, however, must guide but not replace the individualized decisionmaking required in the IEP process. In fact, the IDEA's focus on the individual needs of each child with a disability is an essential consideration when IEP teams are writing annual goals that are aligned with state academic content standards for the grade in which a child is enrolled so that the child can advance appropriately towards attaining those goals during the annual period covered by the IEP. In developing an IEP, the IEP team must consider how a child's specific disability impacts his or her ability to advance appropriately toward attaining his or her annual goals that are aligned with applicable state content standards during the period covered by the IEP. They go on to say on page 5, the standards must be clearly related to goallevel content, all though they may be restricted in scope or complexity, or take the form of introductory or prerequisite skills. We feel this information in the letter confirms that for our students, it is appropriate to be focusing on introductory or prerequisite skills as long as they lead towards closing the gap between a student and his or her sameage peers in specific content areas. For today, however, we will be focusing on functional skills and their relationship to the ECC, or the expanded core curriculum. In January we will be discussing how the alignment with standard curriculum content can be done. So step two says we need to examine the classroom and student data to determine student functioning in relation to gradelevel standards. Student data consists of teacher observation, progress notes, assessment, and other data that will provide a good picture of the student's functioning in relation to his or her sameage peers. This leads directly to developing the student's current level of performance, or what we refer in Texas as present levels of achievement and functional performance, or PLAAFP. In addition to assessment done and other assessment data, we strongly suggest using the functional scheme assessment with students who are being considered for Active Learning instruction. Now, we won't be providing instruction on how to use the functional scheme during these webinars, since we simply don't have the time. But I do want to remind you that you can view the 201516 Active Learning study group by following the menu link under the assessment tab. And these webinars do focus on how to use this instrument. The reason we recommend this assessment is because very few assessment tools for visually impaired or deafblind individuals assess skills in such detail and begin at such early developmental levels. What is also nice about this assessment is that once it is done you have a great overall picture of the student and a nice way to continue to document the student's progress over time. However, if you have other tools you like  for example, we're big on the communication matrix  that you want to use as well, that's not a problem. The blank spaces under each set of skills listed in the functional scheme allows you to write in additional skills. Dr. Nielsen felt that the functional scheme should be a dynamic tool and designed it so we could add these things. Here is an example of an assessment summary on our student, Jack. Though we have used color to illustrate where the student is functioning currently, the boxes shown in yellow, typically this summary sheet would contain the dates the assessment was done and the initials of who had done the assessment. As you can see in this example, our student is functioning at a developmental level of 03 months in the areas of mouth movement, visual perception, auditory perception, haptic tactile perception, olfactory gustatory perception, spatial perception, language comprehensive, social perception, emotional perception, as well as toileting skills, eating skills, undressing and dressing, and personal hygiene. He is functioning at 69 months developmentally in fine movement, gross movement, object perception, nonverbal, and verbal language. As we develop his current level of performance, we also have information about his ideology and healthrelated information to consider. So when we put this together, here's a sample of a statement of current levels of performance. Assessment including functional scheme and communication matrix showed that Jack functions between 06 months developmentally. He has microcephaly, hypotonic cerebral palsy, and CVI. He has visual responses in the midline to inferior region with visual loss throughout the superior range. He does respond well to red light. Jack eats pureed food and he drinks from a sippy cup with help. Jack is able to roll over independently. He is working on sitting with support, though he is currently able to sit for approximately ten minutes unsupported in a tailor sitting position. He cannot sit in a chair without support to his trunk. He is not yet able to independently get into a prone on elbows position. He does not crawl or stand without support. He is currently developing grasp and release with each hand. Jack's hearing appears normal, though he doesn't have formal speech as yet. He uses vocalizations, facial expressions, and body movements for expressive communication, and his receptive communication is undetermined. When stressed, Jack engages in selfinjurious behavior, but he is able to return to calm when comforted by a familiar adult. Once the PLAAFP has been developed and before the IEP is developed, it's a really good idea for the family to meet with the educational team to discuss priority areas for the development of the IEP. So here is an example of priorities for our student. And though you may see the student work on skills in many areas, it's important to remember that not all skills will necessarily be reflected in the IEP. We felt like in terms of functional skills area or the ECC that priorities were selfconcept and emotional skills, fine and gross motor skills, especially use of hands, arms, legs, feet, and mouth, foundational concepts related to object properties and functions, receptive and expressive communication, audition, that is, recognizing and localizing sounds, vision and other senses to locate and identify objects and people, and tactile exploration to support vision and hearing. Now, we know that regulations state that students in special education should have goals that cover both academic and functional skills, as we mentioned before. So what do we really mean by functional? Wright's Law talks about functional skills meaning nonacademic, routine activities of everyday living. This should help understand that the purpose of the IEP is to prepare children with disabilities for life after school. This should also help the school understand that teaching children how to function in the world is just as important as teaching academic skills. We also know that students with visual impairments should have goals written in the nine areas of the expanded core curriculum. Most of the goals in these areas are functional. Some of ECC areas we feel are priority areas at these very early stages of development are compensatory or functional academic skills, including communication, orientation and mobility, social interaction skills, independent living skills, recreation and leisure skills, sensory efficiency skills, and selfdetermination. For some kids, especially those who may be functioning at a slightly higher developmental level, you know, areas such as career education and use of assistive technology may also be a part of those skills that you want to consider. But for our student we feel that right now where he is, we're not going to place an emphasis on these two areas of the ECC. Children with visual impairments or deafblindness, if they have any usable vision or hearing, need to have opportunities to improve the use of this residual sensory information. This means goals in both vision and hearing. Also, tactile skills are critical to support residual vision, and also to compensate when there is no vision present. Learning concepts and expressive and receptive language skills are critical, and usually of great importance to the family. Learning to orient to people and objects in their environment and move safely to explore the world around them is an obvious prerequisite for learning. Active Learning, just as the name implies, means we recognize the need to get these students moving, reaching, grasping, rolling, walking, are more likely to happen if the child knows where he or she is in space, and where things are in relation to themselves. One of the priorities for all students, I believe, especially at this level, should be social and emotional development. For students at these earliest levels of development, it is very important to understand their social and emotional developmental levels. When children feel insecure or fearful of the adult and the situations in their classroom, little learning can take place. The information also will help guide the team in understanding how to utilize the five phases of educational treatment during instruction. We need to spend a longer period of time simply getting the child to allow us to be with them without becoming stressed. If it takes longer, we need to give the child that much time. Also, for many learners, their ability to demonstrate some skills at high levels does not necessarily mean that their emotional level is also high. If we do not address this gap, the child is less likely to fully integrate skills as part of their personality. And we are more likely to see disruptive behaviors occur. We also may notice that the child does not seem to generalize skills as easily. We also need to allow children opportunities to play at their developmental level. All children at the earliest developmental levels engage in solitary play. As they become more socially mature, they move into parallel play and eventually into interactive play. Children at the earliest stages need to feel that they can choose what they want to play with and with whom they want to play. They need to feel successful and take pride in their ability to do things. These are all important aspects of selfdetermination. So, for our student, here is how the priority skills we have chosen relate to the various ECC areas. Selfconcept and emotional skills relate to social interaction and selfdetermination in the ECC. Fine, gross motors, relate both to compensatory and O&M skills. Overall body awareness is also important to orientation and mobility. Foundational concepts such as object properties and functions along with receptive and expressive communication skills, whether verbal or nonverbal, are all part of communication, one area of compensatory skills. Audition, vision, and tactile skill development are worked on as part of sensory efficiency and orientation and mobility. Oral motor skills for feeding are part of independent living skills and also speech skills. Many of these skills are developed through tactile exploration with lips, tongue, and teeth. Part of what we see children doing at very early developmental levels. The reason very young children use their mouth to gather tactile information is because of the tactile sensitivity of their mouth area and because they may not be adept at exploring with their hands yet. At the same time, using the muscles of the mouth, tongue, and jaw help to develop different vocalizations which may lead to speech. Communication is part of compensatory skills. So what does this mean for us when developing goals for students who are at these earliest developmental levels? What should these goals look like? In Texas we are guided to use an alignment process in the IEP for students who participate in our alternative assessment that is based on access points or prerequisite skills. We reference a variety of documents in this process, but one that is particularly useful for our students is Texas Early Learning Pathways. The link to this download is included in your handout. Now, while we don't have time to review all of this document, it does align with the Texas Infant, Toddler, and the 3yearold Early Learning Guidelines and Revised Texas PreKindergarten Guidelines that help us align to the state standard curriculum. It spotlights important pathways of development from birth to age 5 and illustrates how very early development relates to subsequent school readiness. This information is organized in charts around four developmental domains  social and emotional development, which is also part of the ECC, language and communication development, again, part of the ECC, cognitive development, and physical health and motor development, again, all of these still relate to the ECC. But what I really like is that it goes a step further to point you to standard content areas such as math, science, social studies, reading, writing, health, and physical education. This comes in very handy when you are addressing alignment to the general curriculum. We'll look more at this document in our January webinar, but I would like to encourage you to download the PDF and take a look at it before then. Now that we've taken care of steps one through three that we've been guided to use, we are ready to develop our actual goals. But before we do that, let's take some time to hear from you. I'm very interested to know if your state has any documents that are similar to the ones that I've shown you from Texas. And so here is our poll. Nathan, if you would pull our poll up on the screen. Okay. We're joining you live. And I would invite you all to please take a moment and respond to this poll. I'm very curious about this. I have to say, one of the things that's been very interesting to me  Trish Board shared a document with us that shows what they do in Australia. And, you know, they're dealing with the same issues we're dealing with. I was really  relieved to know that we're not the only ones trying to figure all of this out. It does seem that they have a plan. They list Active Learning  the functional scheme curriculum as one of their sources for their goals, their skills, and so that's very nice. And I would like to see us here in the States be able to get something to point to so that people know exactly how to do it. Charlotte: And we will be doing that  talking about that some more in January. Kate: A whole lot more. Charlotte: As a nonTexan sitting here, at the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts, I wanted to mention I love the Texas Early Learning Pathways document. It covers birth through three. And the access skills and what I've seen, documents in other states, oftentimes they start at a much higher cognitive level. And so there's always that gap for the students that we're talking about. So I think that's what we're particular interested in, is not just the access skills, but really that birth to three level. Kate: That it goes down that far. Charlotte: Exactly. Kate: So we've had quite a lot of response. And I know some of you folks are in  on phones and stuff and can't necessarily respond. But just briefly let's talk about this poll. It looks like it's about half and half of individuals whose states have a document similar to the one that I shared and half that do not. I would invite you guys to take a look at this. I found it very helpful. And like I said in the prerecorded part, I really appreciated that it would sort of point you towards not only functional skills, but academic content as well. And help in your alignment process. Charlotte: Thanks for saying that, Kate. And I'm also just putting my email address in the chat window because I think in addition to having these raw numbers, I think we'd be really interested in getting links from your states or your provinces, or your countries. Kate: Absolutely. Charlotte: Wherever you are, or if you've got something that's just in your school, I think part of what we're able to do by having this Active Learning Space website is being able to compile resources. Even as an honorary Texan, I'm not going to say steal, but I do look at  I use  benefit from. Kate: I think we all should benefit from each other's work. There's so much out there that's good, and we'd be silly not to use it. Charlotte: Absolutely. Kate: Exactly. Charlotte: So I just put my email address  yes, Mary, thank you. We do all learn from others. So if anybody does have a document  many of you who did write yes, if you could email the link to that to me, that would be great. And then I'll share them with others. If you have  if you don't have it electronically like that, you can also figure out how to scan it and put it in Dropbox or something. That's also fine. Kate: Great. So we had some additional thoughts, and we're very interested in hearing your thoughts, which you can put into the chat or you can unmute your mics and just speak up and let us know what you're thinking. But one of the things that came up for us when we were trying to develop sample goals  and we're going to show you a few here in a minute. If you look in your handout, you can look at some of them. But depending on your district, and depending on who you're working with, you may want to really think about how detailed to make the criteria in your goals. They may need to be very, very specific for folks who don't have a clue what Active Learning is, or the equipment. Or they may not need to be quite so specific. So just think about that. Also, I know in our state we have a modifications page. And so some of the stuff you want to include on the modifications page as well as having it in your goals. Also, if the teacher is doing lesson plans and other people in the room don't know anything about Active Learning, it's good to put more detail into your lesson plan. This is the goal I'm working on, here's the equipment we need. You know, so on and so forth. And also one of the things that I think is really important  and I know the group that I worked with out in Bastrop last year was really good at this  was looking at how to infuse goals into a single activity. And even to infuse skills into a single goal. For example, you might do something like using a visually directed reach, the child will reach and touch a pegboard or other object, and use a breaking motion or something like that. So you can combine OTrelated skills with vision skills or tactile skills at the same time. So that's something else to think about. And then we have some other thoughts. Charlotte: Yes. Kate: Can you go to the next slide, please, Nathan? Charlotte: So with this one we just wanted to be sure that there's something measurable. I think this is just a good reminder that you don't put a child in a little room and leave. A little room is not a piece of babysitting equipment, or a TV you plunk somebody in front of. You want to be observing and measuring. That holds true for any of the goals that we'd be looking at. Kate: I think if you use a functional scheme and you're specifying skills, it makes it real easy to track progress over time. From week to week you can go back to that functional scheme and in some cases use that actual sheet as a way to document what you see going on. But certainly to share with families in terms of, like, your six weeks reporting, this, that, and the other. You can really show specific skill progress there. Charlotte: The other thing I would just jump in and add about the functional scheme, for those of who you who have not used it, and a number of you have not had a chance to, I love how small it breaks things down to. Kate: Yes. Charlotte: And I think again, as I've said before, there are a lot of great tools out there, but many of them are not so applicable to the students that we're talking about here, where there are huge, sweeping goals that might take several years to accomplish. It's very hard to measure that unless you break it down. Kate: Right. Oh, and one other thought. If you're using a functional scheme, we're going to pick certain skills to include in the IEP. That's not all the child may work on. What's nice with the functional scheme is you can track progress in skills that you didn't necessarily include specifically in the IEP. And I think that's very important. And if you're doing this as you go along, then you are updating that assessment. And it really is great for the team as they go forward to do planning for new activities, a new year, when that transition occurs. So I think that's really, really important. We have some comments here. Let's share some of these. Claire says, I use the phrase in a custom learning environment in most of my goals to give room for working on goals in lots of environments. I like that. Tina says, I have sensorybased activities, active learning space. Oops, mine just jumped. Hang on a minute. Charlotte: And selfdirected activities as accommodations. Yeah. And Mary writes, I was at a conference last spring where Clark presented on the ECC and suggested using a learning web design to use with one activity and to implement ECC components into the one activity. Kate: Great idea. Charlotte: Yeah. And Anne chimes in she likes Claire's idea. Liz mentions that families love the photos and videos we take of their child. I found they share things when they're at home that I can also incorporate at school, or they can position or create learning activities like they see in the photos and videos. That's a great idea, Liz, because I think sometimes for families, they come into an IEP meeting. There's all this jargon, big words that might not be that meaningful, but the picture or video drives the point home. Kate: That falls in nicely with a portfolio, a progress report, that's really good. Jannette says once the IEP is approved, I write a stepbystep description for my IAs to help them understand what needs to be done. Each child has a folder and each goal has the stepbystep description. Terrific. Charlotte: Yeah, nice idea. And Laura mentioned she also had a parent come into the classroom and see how we work with a student. That's always an excellent idea, because not only can they see what you're doing, but then they can say, at home we noticed that he's more attracted to this color, or we've seen him turn this way. So it's a great, important thing to not just talk, but to see what each other's  Kate: Absolutely. Okay. And then one more thought. And then we're going to take a look at some sample goals. You guys keep commenting. We're going to come back to that more in a second. When you're writing your goals you want to remember to write the goal to include any appropriate perceptualizing aids. And don't limit yourself. You might be working over a support bench where they're doing a grasp and release of the bench, but they could also maybe do it with an SPG board or in a little room or whatever. So be sure to include all the possible equipment that you might use. And the other thing is the child might be at one school using certain equipment and they move to another school that doesn't have that equipment. You know, giving as many ideas in there as possible can be very helpful, I think. Okay. And then a couple of more comments, and then we're going to look at some of these sample goals here. Let's see. Hilary says we often use step by step description as well with expected student behaviors to take data from a single routine that may address several IEP goals. That's really good. Mary says our school started to use FaceTime to implement collaboration with others that can't be done in person at the lesson, and that is really nice. You know, we have all these great new distance technologies and it's really a lovely way that we can start using some of these to share information with the family as well. I think that's really terrific. Chapter 4. Sample Goals Let's take a look at our first sample goal that Charlotte and I put together. And this is a sample goal for gross motor. And if you could, Nathan, pull up that slide. So here's how we wrote it. By the end of the IEP completion date, when positioned in prone on a support bench or other appropriate equipment, the child will reach and grasp a desired object two times during a tenminute period. Okay. And hopefully in this we have included all the critical aspects of a goal, and we recognize that, you know, in some places you are directed to write benchmarks as well as goals. So you can break that down to once within a longer period, or you might have some other way of measuring it. But the biggest thing is that you know specifically what behavior you're looking for in  from the child. And I think that's one of the things that we have to be really clear with, because oftentimes the person that we're going to be asking to take data, maybe a paraprofessional, and they need to understand what it is they're supposed to be taking data on. And without that criteria, we don't know what we're looking at. Charlotte: And the other thing about that goal was that we put in very specifically support bench so that we're naming the piece of equipment or the perceptualizing aid, but we recognize there might be other times to work on that. So we gave ourselves the out of saying or, another piece of appropriate equipment. Kate: Yep. Okay. And then our next goal that we wrote is on fine motor. And this one says by the end of the IEP completion date, when the adult uses Dr. Nielsen's stage of offering technique to introduce a variety of materials while the child uses perceptualizing aids, the student will demonstrate grasp and release at least two times during a 1020 minute period. Again, some of the same things we pointed out. We did this because we saw another example of somebody doing this, saying specifically the adult is going to be using the offering technique and that's how we're going to get there. Now, we're running short on time, and I don't need to read each of these goals for you. I think you can do that in your handout. And we wanted to show you a video of our student, Jack, working with Cindy, his instructor. And Cindy is going to be using the offering technique. Charlotte: And Kate, I wanted to mention that the video that we're about to see is also on our Active Learning Space website. Kate: It just went up today. Charlotte: Just in time. We hope  we love this video, and Patty was generous enough to share it with us. We really hope that you'll make a point of watching the whole thing and looking at it with teams. I think parents will find it interesting. And so we're just going to see a very short clip from it today. Kate: Right. And I'm going to put the link to the page so that you can go back afterwards when you have more time and view the entire video, because it's a really neat video. And we're so grateful to the folks at Penrickton for sharing not only their expertise, but their children and their films with us. Charlotte: Absolutely. Kate: Okay. That's just a little taste, and please go on the website and check out more. We've run out of time, unfortunately. We hope that you've gotten some good stuff out of our webinar today. And please join us in January. Charlotte: We have one more thing to say. That's why we work in teams. It's about the assignment. So a number of you had mentioned in the pod that you found the goals helpful. Thank you so much for the feedback. But we would love to try to create an activity  sorry, an IEP bank, a goal bank. A couple of people have asked about that. So that will take a while, but as somebody said earlier, we all learn from each other. So if you have some ideas, please do submit your goal to Kate. And her email address is there on the screen. And we hope that be able to put some together. Kate: Yeah. And we will see you all in January. Charlotte: Yes. And keep reading your enewsletter because we've got a lot of new things coming up soon with videos. And we'll let you know. So we'll see you in January. Byebye. [Silence] Fade up from black. Animation: Text for TSBVI transform into braille cells for TSBVI. Fade to black.