TRANSCRIPT - TSBVI Coffee Hour: Effective Itinerant Strategies Ð 11/7/22 >>Rachel: Hello, everybody. My name is Rachel Collins and I am a Deafblind education consultant in the outreach department at Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. And today I'm going to be sharing some itinerant strategies. I've served in multiple different educational placement settings and so we're just going to kind of go through all of that. So for today's agenda, what we're going to be covering today are just like the differences in all those placements I was just mentioning. We're going to take a look at a really awesome resource called the new VI professional year at a glance. It's a LiveBinder and some different ideas for documentation for documentation of IEP goals and objectives or just consultation and meetings. And then how to decide some resources on how to decide how do you decide on service times for your students. And then, last, I'm going to share some resources on where you can go if you need some extra help. So we'll get started. So I started off as a Deaf Ed teacher in AISD and that was a self-contained -- I had three students, very small. I just wanted to go through the differences between all the different placements that I've been in and just how different of a placement and how I needed to switch my mindset in each of those different placements. In the self-contained environment in a school district, you know, the schedules for the grade level is determined already by, you know, the grade level lead and then you just plug in your daily schedule according to that. Do you have a small class size so that you don't have very many students that you have to manage. And then you have different opportunities to collaborate with different teachers within that grade level. And, also, you can have different collaboration with the people in your grade level as well as if you are a Deaf Ed teacher or teacher for the visually impaired, you can have those different kinds of collaboration. And then I think one of the biggest things that being in a self-contained classroom is that you set the pace of what goes on in your classroom. You're the one who sets up routines. You're the one who sets up, you know, the flow of how it's going to be. So you have complete control over what goes on in your classroom. After I was working at my self-contained Deaf Ed class, I went over to the School for the Blind and I started working with Deafblind students. So the shift between a self-contained classroom in a school district and a residential school was pretty big. The bell schedules are just set by the school but in a residential setting you do have a lot of wiggle room. So you have a lot of, you know, inputs from other people, you know, supporting you on how you fill those different times. And just the same as with self-contained classrooms. You have a very small class size in residential areas. And then I thought what was the most amazing part of working in residential is that you have multiple service providers. So speech, OT, PT, behavior specialists who would come in and provide all of these different kinds of supports to you and provide guidance on how to provide instruction to your students. The same as with self-contained. You have control over what goes on in your classroom. You decide what the routines are. You decide what the flow is. Lots of control there. Then I switched over to the itinerant world and prior to coming to the School for the Blind in the Outreach department, I served as the Deafblind specialist for Round Rock ISD but when I first became an itinerant teacher, it was a huge, huge shock to the system. Your schedule is completely dictated by all the students that you serve on your caseload so that spans across different campuses. That spans across different grade levels and bell schedules. You've got block scheduling that you have to work through and then you have to look at whenever you're planning your schedule you have to look at what classes you can pull from and when and have that kind of match up to, you know, what your day is going to look like. Your caseload is going to vary, so you can have a very small caseload if you have students who have a lot of service minutes or a very large caseload. It really just depends and you have to fit all of those things into a schedule. You work with lots of different teams, lots of different people. You work with a lot of different personalities and you have to approach each educational team very differently. But the key here is collaboration. You have to be able to work within all of those different spaces and different teams and different personalities to provide the best instruction to your student. I think probably one of the hardest things for me to get used to was that you have no control over what goes on in those classrooms. Those are those teachers' classrooms and you are there to provide support to your student and to provide support for the teachers who are instructing the student. So as the itinerant, you know, one of the most important things that you have to do is to help the classroom teacher develop and adopt best strategies that feel authentic to them. Because if it feels authentic to the classroom teachers then they're more likely to follow through with those different strategies. All right. So you have just become an itinerant TSVI. What do you do now? This meme really spoke to me because this was exactly how I was feeling when I first became an itinerant TVI. So just imagine that you are -- you've just come into a school district. You're an itinerant TVI. You see all the other TSVIs, if you're lucky enough to be in a placement where there's multiple and not just by yourself. That happens too. Everybody is bustling around. Everybody is busy. Everybody is doing all of these things and you're thinking to yourself, oh, my gosh, I should be doing these things too. But you don't know what these things are. That was my experience and I struggled for a little bit and so hopefully today these strategies can kind of help alleviate some of that stress. Okay. So the first resource that I would like to show you is the new VI professional year at a glance. So this right here is a month by month checklist. It is a LiveBinder -- and all of these things are going to be shared with you in the handout. But this was developed by Chrissy Cowan, the coordinator at TSBVI Outreach. And so when you have no idea what you are going to do, you can go through these different colored tabs and it gives you like a checklist of different things that you could work on. So here for August, you know, it's not setting up folders and all over here on the left-hand-side of the panel you've got how to set these things up, how to set up the packets, how to set up the schedules, how to create traveling folders, all of those different things. So they have -- there's a checklist for every single month. Now, this is extremely helpful for new TVIs but it can also be helpful for seasoned TVIs who may not have seen this or may not have -- may get some ideas of different resources and handouts that they can use. I'm a big fan of digital media so you can take some of these ideas, create something in an electronic format to share out with different teachers, with different service providers. It's kind of like a recipe where you have -- you start off with a set list of directions and ingredients and things like that and you kind of tweak and adapt as you gain more experience. And then you can make it your own. And that's the beauty about itinerant -- being an itinerant is that you create your own kind of system. And you can start off with something -- if you don't know what to start off with first and it works. And it will -- it's kind of like a moving -- it's a moving, flowing -- like what's the word that I'm trying to use here? I think it's something that there is no set way to do this. You decide how and when to create these different things. There are some things that are out of date -- and we'll come back to this again later. But this is Tatjana BVI contact list in the Texas sensory network. There have been so many changes this year and just to let you know this is still being revised. So I would recommend going to the Texas Sensory Network for the latest copy of that. All right. Okay. So when we're looking at the beginning of the year, there are some main things that we want to focus in on. So that beginning of the year hustle and bustle there are three main things that you want to do: You want to be laying out your caseload. You want to set up your travel folders and you want to start contacting teachers, getting schedules, getting staffings on the books. So I just want to give you some examples. People do this very differently all across the board and I'm sure even people on my same team did all of these things differently than I did. These are just the things that helped me stay focused and stay organized. At the beginning of the year when I would get my caseload, I would create a document and I would have all of the important dates that I needed to keep track of. And so I created a sample one here. And what I would do is I had their name and just when I needed to make sure that reports were due and when I needed to have a heads up of when to start requesting those assessments during ARD meetings. I would color code it so I knew -- obviously red is right away, emergency. These need to be looked at first priority. And then I would just kind of pick random colors to kind of denote when these assessments were due. And so here's one sheet, if you can all fit it on one page, but one sheet that has all that information that you can get quickly. So I would create a traveling folder. And so I actually had a binder. Some people really wanted all the things digital. I didn't want everything digital because it was harder for me to look at those different things like have a device and kind of look up all those different things. It was easier for me to have specific things in a folder so I had easy access to it. In my traveling folder, which was just a three-ring binder, I had dividers, campus maps, bell schedules, the important pieces like FVE/LMA reports, I would vision charts -- since I was a Deafblind specialist I had audiograms like on speech bananas. At least for me being able to see what field the student uses and where on the hearing -- like the speech banana or the audiogram that they could hear, was easier for me to explain to other teachers where our student was at. You know, to help them understand the vision and the hearing piece better. And then I would have the most recent IEP goals and objectives and then a list of accommodations. But this link right here leads you back to that checklist, TVI month by month at a glance. All of these different documents are in that binder. So this was something that was already placed in there as suggestions of how to create a travel folder. My goal was not to have as many pieces of paper to travel with, I just needed the main key pieces to be able to serve my students well. All right. So when you're setting up staffings, what do these kinds of things entail? This is the beginning of the year. You are in your prep week and everybody is so busy. Everybody's going to meetings. Everybody is trying to get their classroom set up. But this is when the staffings need to happen. Because once school starts and a teacher finds out that they have a high-need Braille student in their class or somebody who uses a lot of technology, it's going to be a lot worse to catch back up, as opposed to getting started before school starts to give them information about the student, about their accommodations, about technology that they need. And so what I would do is I would create like a one-page document that had all of this information on it. I would have the vision impairment -- and not the scientific terms of their eye condition. You could mention it but what is really important to the teachers is how does the eye condition or sensory impairment impact them in class? What do the teachers need to do in class to help the student access the information. That's the kind of information that you want to have. Hopefully that type of information is in the FVE/LMA and the accommodations portion or the educational implications portion. So this gives like very concrete information to the classroom teacher of what exactly needs to be provided to the student. I would also -- yeah, sorry. So, also it's really important to keep it simple. I think that everybody is really busy at the very beginning of the year and they're not able to retain a lot of information. So keeping it simple is going to be key. I think that the teachers will appreciate it. I think that, you know, sharing how -- sharing exactly what your role is going to be important because I think that sometimes teachers will kind of default to thinking that you're there to only help a student or you're going to be helping teach the content, and that's not the role of an itinerant TSVI. So you have to reiterate that you're going to teach access but not the content piece. And there in the LiveBinder there is also a document of what the role is, so if that would be helpful to a teacher to give that information to them. Then you can also provide that. Because there's going to need to be a lot of collaboration and communication, it's going to be important to at least attempt to set up a meeting time or how frequently that you are going to want to meet with the team so that way there isn't any lag in services and there isn't any lag in access to the student for the information. I'm going super fast. Does anybody have any questions for me right now? I'm going to keep going. All right. So now we're at the documentation piece and documentation is key and there are literally a plethora of ways to do this. I'm going to show you a few ways that helped me keep things organized. Everybody school district uses different kinds of systems but I know that eSped is one of the more popular ones. In eSped in the application there are like tracking forms. And so at the end where you're tracking for progress and things like that, they actually have these sheets that already are all drafted with the IEP goals and objectives that have been added to the IEP. And if you download them as a PDF, you can then use your Adobe Acrobat Reader and it becomes a fillable form, which is brilliant. I love that it's a fillable form. >>Kaycee: Rachel, you have several participants that are outside of the State of Texas. Would you explain what ARD means? >>Rachel: Okay. So sorry. In Texas we like to do things different and ARD is Admission, Review, and Dismissal. It's basically what everybody else calls an IEP. We call the meeting and the committee an ARD committee. I am not quite certain what the reason is for the difference. I'm not really quite sure except for the fact that Texas just likes to do things differently. But ARD is synonymous with IEP. >>Kaycee: Thank you. >>Rachel: You're welcome. Some other ways is like when creating Google forms. When there's an ARD -- sorry, IEP. ARD/IEP and you're needing to get information. This is something I like to send out to my students' teachers. I send this information out to get information for the ARD or to get information for my FVE/LMAs to get teacher input. All I've done is created a Google form so that way it sends it out to all of the teachers. I'm sure you guys are familiar with how Google forms work. They fill it out. It populates in a spreadsheet and it gives you all the beautiful information that you need to have to be able to share out how the student is doing in general ed or other classes. You can create whatever type of questionnaire or get any type of information that you possibly could need by using Google forms. And then you can also use Google forms to document IEPs, which is super fun. So I created a pretend one. And you can do this lots of different ways again. This is where you get to be creative because you can do whatever you want and organize it and style it however you want. But so for instance I took the IEP tracking sheet that was on the eSped documentation, like our documentation software. Sometimes you may not have access to paper, whatever or you're just wanting to do it like super quick. You can create something that has all of that same information in there and that you can do drop down menus or whatever tracking you're needing to do. So here, like the date that you collected the data, what grading period it is, what type of service it is. And then you can enter in your goals and then how exactly you're wanting to track it. And so when you do this, then, again, with Google forms, it populates all that information so you have all of that documentation right there for you. So when it comes time for progress reporting periods, all of that information is all beautifully organized for you. You can also use Google Docs. Same kind of thing. You can either print this out or you can type into the Google Doc all the information that you're needing and wanting. It could be anecdotal. It could be quantitative, really anything that you want. And just pen and paper. What are some other ways that you guys have used documentation or what are some other ways that you document goals and ARD information and things like that? >>Kaycee: We have one that came in that says pen and paper on a quote, unquote cheat sheet. >>Rachel: Cheat sheet, by that do you mean that it just has all -- like the goal information and what exactly you're trying to chart progress in? >>Kaycee: While she's typing, Kate shared that she's used Notability on the iPad. They said yes to your question. And then -- >>Rachel: Note ability, I haven't heard of that. >>Kaycee: Google forms for Braille transcript requests. >>Rachel: That is so perfect. >>Kaycee: Alex says she does everything in Google forms that she creates. Lots of frontloading, however it makes everything else super easy. >>Rachel: To put it in is time consumer but once you put it in there you're just clicking and it's so fast. Yes, I absolutely agree. Okay. So I also like to document or have documentation on different consultations that I have with different educational teams and just the meetings that we have. So one of the things that I would like to do with my educational teams is do share docs through Google. So, for instance, we would all meet as a team -- and this was more for my MIVI or more complex needs students where you're providing consultation. But these students are needing a lot more exposure and a lot more direct kind of -- like hands-on experience. And so this lent itself very well to having that cross-curricular activities like, you know, among all of the different service providers. This was a great way to bring in all of your service providers together to collaborate and decide, you know, what kinds of activities and what types of things to work on. Instead of the speech, working on whatever they're going to work on, some random topic. Or OT. Everybody is working on the same thing while still working on the student's goals. So what we would do, at the beginning of the week -- we would actually plan out two weeks in advance. And so a lot of our functional learning classrooms or functional academic classrooms or modified classrooms used this as a unique learning system. So some of the that stuff was not very accessible to our students who have more complex needs because there aren't a lot of opportunities for them to experience those things. So here was kind of an example of something that we created on a topic and so we would all sit together and we would decide like what were the concepts that we wanted to share. What were the concepts that the student was actually going to have multiple opportunities to experience. And then build on the activities from there. I did not -- I didn't plan out what the service providers were going to do. We did this together. And if one of them couldn't show up to a meeting, I would share this document so that anybody who wasn't able to get to the meeting could go back to it and reference it and be able to see and put in based on the concept we wanted to provide or based on the activity what is something within the goal that they're working on that they could also target with an activity that's related to what the theme of the week or the theme of the two weeks were. That was always really fun. And then what I like to do is I like to keep track of our meeting notes. So this was a much more informal way -- for the same reasons I did with the shared collaboration documentation. It doesn't matter if somebody is able to make a meeting or not, they always have access to it. And so they'll always know -- everybody on the team always knows what topics were discussed in the meeting and what the action plans were for the next meeting. And everybody knows who's responsible for what and who's going to be making what or who's going to be bringing whatever materials. I really liked this kind of form. This worked really well for my thinking, just because everything was together. So if you're like, I know, I think we talked about this a while ago, I could scroll and I could see okay, yes. On this date we talked about this thing and we had had a plan for this. Because sometimes things fall through the cracks. And sometimes, you know, we forget. And so to have to go back and forth between different documents was a little bit more confusing than just having everything in a running log. But I did also have consult forms as well. I did have like a more formal consultation form and I would keep track of these as well. But I loved to the log one so that way we could all scroll. It was just easier that way. >>Kaycee: Rachel, this is Kaycee. Would you describe what columns you had captured on that form, for ones who don't have visual access to what you're showing? >>Rachel: Yes. So for the consultation documentations or for the -- for this one? Okay. So I titled it the consult data and usually I would have the student's name in front of it and the year and then I had four different columns. The first one being the date and then the second column would be the team members that were present in that meeting. And then the third column was topics that were discussed. And then the fourth column was the action items. And then the more formal one I created a table that had, you know, the VI teacher, you know, the consultation form, my contact information like my e-mail and my phone number. And then like the header at the top of the page would be the information that you could enter in the student's name, the date, who the classroom teacher is, if there was an intervener, what campus it was, and who is providing the consultation. And then the fillable fields were consultation notes so that would just be where you were answering the topics that were discussed, the action items, and when the next scheduled meeting would be. Does anybody have any questions on documentation, on meetings or anything like that? Are there other ways other people documented their meetings with their teams? Let's just go on. >>Kaycee: Kate said post-its? I like this idea of Google though. >>Rachel: So now we're looking at service times, like how do you decide how much time to serve a student. And I'm sure -- because we've got people here from all over the country in different states and I'm not sure what types of service intensity scales that you guys have. In Texas, a newer resource that we have is called the VISSIT. The visual impairment scale of service intensity of Texas . We're going to go through it if you're not familiar with it. But what are some other things that people from different states use to decide how many minutes to serve a student? >>Kaycee: The Michigan severity vision scale. >>Rachel: Heard of that one. Are there any others? Okay. Let's look at this. Okay. On the TSBVI website, if you go into statewide resources, then professional development, then publications, you'll come to VISSIT. So the VISSIT has been designed to help teachers of students with visual impairments decide what kind of service and how many -- like the kind of service that you're going to provide, either consultation or direct, and how many minutes of each of those that you are going to recommend for the students on your caseload. This has been really helpful because I think that a lot of times questions come up, like how do you know how long to serve a student? And this scale helps you look at these different areas to determine how many minutes does a student need. This also -- there's also one for O&Ms -- and I don't know if we have any O&Ms in the audience today but they also have one for O&Ms. So we look at this -- I'm just going to pull up the document. Oh, no. Come on. Sorry, guys. Let me try again. Nope. Nope. It's not going to do it. Okay. Sweet! Best laid plans, right? No. Well, we're not going to sit there and go through this all day. So with the VISSIT what it does is it has you write different areas. It has you write areas that you feel what type of need. Is it a low need, a medium need, a high need, and then an extremely high need area. It also looks at how much -- how big of a need is this within your educational team. So maybe a student may not need direct teaching of certain areas but the educational team may be new to the student and the educational team needs a lot of coaching and a lot of assistance and support in giving the instruction to a student with visual or multiple impairments. So maybe your direct service time is not very high but your consultation service is very, very high. And you see this a lot with students with more complex needs. And sometimes what I have seen in the past is that a lot of students with more complex needs have really low minutes. And I have found in my professional experience that the students who have more complex needs actually have a lot of time, a lot more time because you're making so many different things to be able to have that student access their environment and access their instruction. And so this scale and this tool helps to focus in on where the needs are and how to provide them. How to provide for that need. It also takes into consideration like transition. So maybe a student is not really needing a whole lesson but they're about to transition so that's going to be a whole new team of people and a whole new campus. You're going to want to front load and make sure that team is prepared and ready to receive your student so that they get the best instruction they can. Okay. Does anybody have any questions about the VISSIT or can anybody give me some examples or tell us about some of your experiences with using the VISSIT? >>Kate: Rachel, this is Kate popping in. I have it pulled up on my computer if you want me to share my screen. >>Rachel: Oh, that would be great! Thank you. >>Kate: Yeah, if you want to stop share and then I can. >>Rachel: Let me do that. Sorry. Sorry about that. Okay. All right. >>Kate: Are you all seeing it? >>Rachel: Okay. So it gives you instructions on how to use it, which is always good. And then you rate it. And so with each different category you're either going to rate like a zero, like a 1, 4, 7, and 10. I believe that those are the numbers. And so then what it does whenever you calculate all of those things, it gives you a number of minutes for direct time. Like a suggestion recommendation. And it also gives you minutes for consult time or educational plan supporting time as well. And so there may be some times that -- there may be some times where you don't agree. Maybe you are wanting to recommend more time or you're wanting to recommend less time. There is a justification for -- you can write in a justification for that. This is especially helpful when you're in your IEP meetings and the question of how did these minutes get decided. How were these minutes -- and this is your documentation to show this is how I rated these different areas, these different instruction areas. And to help like decide what it is you want. I was just reading. Sorry. >>Kaycee: Yeah, a comment came in that said that they have used it and that they felt like it was hard because it didn't take into consideration the other services provided. And so it may be more time than you are physically able to provide in your daily schedule. >>Rachel: Yes. And there is that too. And so, you know, one of the things that I like about this scale is that it gives you a range. It gives you a range of minutes. From 30 minutes a week to 60 minutes. That's a pretty big range and so you can adjust that. That would be a perfect reason for writing in that rationale of, you know, if you're wanting to do 30 minutes, it's saying 30 to 60 minutes and you're struggling doing 30 minutes or something like that. Then what you might want to do is just say that you are going to provide, you know, more meeting time or make sure that you provide the materials or support that the classroom teacher is needing. >>Kaycee: Kate added that the VISSPA could help with that. It's a caseload analysis tool. >>Rachel: Yes, that's coming out soon. Does anybody else have any other -- want to share any more experiences they've had with the VISSIT? I'll share something that I've experienced is that sometimes the VISSIT -- it is subjective because you as the professional are deciding what the need level is. We know that our students have lots of different needs so it's all important, right? But just like the ECC, you can't teach every single thing every single day or every single moment. You have to prioritize. So it may be a need but maybe you're putting it lower on the need scale right now because you're really going to focus on something else. You as the professional decide what it is that the student needs and prioritize the order of how those needs are going to be addressed. >>Kaycee: Alex shared it helps some of my parents see why service time is what is recommended. That it isn't just a made up number. >>Rachel: Exactly! Yes. I think that sometimes people think it's a made-up number and it really isn't a made-up number. It is a great tool and that VISSPA that was mentioned earlier -- I think they're still in the process of tweaking it and finalizing it but this takes in all your minutes, your report-writing minutes, your travel minutes. One of the things as an itinerant I really struggled with was filling up all of my space on my calendar without taking into consideration the travel time that it would take me to get from one place to another. I fell into a trap that would say, oh, those service minutes. I can totally meet those service minutes, no problem. But then I realized that I've added five extra hours on to my caseload time because of the drive time and I'm just like I can't -- you know. And then it's just exhausting and you can't be like driving clear across a city when it's rush hour. It makes it really difficult. That VISSPA is going to help you decide how many minutes you are putting on your caseload, what is that time total, what does that look like. So where can you go if you are still needing more help? I would suggest contacting your local Education Service Centers. Here in Texas we have this list that I shared a little bit earlier and, again, like I mentioned earlier, it is still being revised. However, whatever region you're in there is a lead TVI or O&M or Deafblind specialist that you can contact. I know Region 13 -- this is Region 13 area. There are lots of different events that are put on for new TSVIs as well as TSVIs and COMS. I'm sure that other regions do the exact same thing. I would encourage going out there and asking for help that way. These Coffee Hours are a great way to touch on a lot of different topics and get a lot of different information that you didn't know that you needed. And what's so great about Coffee Hours is that all the sessions are archived so if you ever miss one, it doesn't matter because you can go and access the past Coffee Hours through the archive. And here in Texas, you know, VI Outreach is here to support you if you need us. And that is all I have. >>Kaycee: Elaine shared in the chat that Region 10 also has new VI professional training. >>Rachel: That's awesome. Does anybody have any comments or any questions? I really appreciate you guys coming out. >>Kaycee: Braille readiness scale is another resource that she uses. >>Rachel: Okay. >>Kaycee: And recently found -- and is a big fan of that. >>Rachel: Awesome.