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TRANSCRIPT
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ROSEMARY NILLES: Good morning and welcome to today’s webinar, Writing Standards Aligned,
Measurable Goals for Secondary IEPs. My name is Rosemary Nilles, and my colleague and co-‐presenter
today is Michael Stoehr. We are both educational consultants from PaTTAN Pittsburgh. We both serve
as statewide leads for the secondary transition initiative. Many of you know us from this role, as we
have led the Indicator 13 trainings across the state, along with webinars, video conferences, and live
trainings.
As a reminder, the mission of the Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network,
PaTTAN, is to support the efforts and initiatives of the Bureau of Special Education, and to build the
capacity of local education agencies to serve students who receive special education services. And so
today’s webinar is part of that service.
As another reminder, PDE’s commitment to the least restrictive environment. Our goal for each
child is to ensure that IEP teams begin with the general education setting with the use of supplementary
aids and services before considering a more restrictive environment. Today’s training may provide IEP
teams with additional ways to provide -‐-‐ ideas for ways to provide access to the general education
setting and general education curriculum through the use of standards aligned IEPs.
About today’s session. We know that we have a very large number of participants today from
special educators, including speech language pathologists, to administrators, to parents, to school
psychologists, agency staff, and other service providers, others that I may not have mentioned. Our
focus today is IEPs for students ages 14 and older. And that’s why we said it’s helpful if you have had
some prior background in Indicator 13 training because secondary transition is truly the framework for
today’s content.
Since this is a webinar format and we do have a large number of people, all participants will be
muted. However, you may submit written questions. We will review the questions and stop at
appropriate breaking points to answer those questions related to the topic at hand, and we’ll provide
time at the end of the session to address further questions.
The PowerPoint handout is in PDF format and it’s located on the PaTTAN website,
www.pattan.net, under the Training tab. And under that tab, go to Training Calendar and click the
February 9 date with the title of today’s session. So if you haven’t downloaded the handout, it’s not too
late to do that.
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The goals for today’s session, we’d like participants to be able to describe the relationship or
make connections with measurable annual goals and the secondary transition process. We have found
that there remains confusion in the field related to this as well as the other goal areas. We would also
like our participants to be able to explain the meaning of and the rationale for standards aligned,
measurable annual goals for students ages 14 and older. We’d like you to practice developing standards
aligned, measurable goals for skill deficits.
So we would like you to become more comfortable actually developing meaningful, useful
standards aligned, measurable goals that are based on identified skill deficits as evidenced by
assessment data, but goals that truly assist the student not only in improving his or her academic
achievement, but also in reaching his or her post-‐secondary goals. And this is a good place to remind
you that we say measurable annual goals and we will be saying that, but you will see the abbreviation
MAGS throughout the PowerPoint simply for space saving purposes. Today’s recorder is -‐-‐ today’s
webinar is being recorded and will be closed captioned for later viewing by participants who aren’t able
to be here today.
Today’s session will be presented in segments. And our advanced organizer is we’ll begin with
secondary transition, the context. My colleague, Michael, will be providing that content. The next
segment, background segment, is the standards aligned system in IEPs, a brief connection. And then the
next segment is measurable annual goals and the IEP, the basics. In other words, these three segments
will give you the background that is essential to being able to go on to the next session -‐-‐ section,
standards aligned, measurable annual goals, the process. And that will be the largest segment of today’s
content.
We will provide clarification around some of the points of confusion related to this topic. We
will provide demonstrations of developing a standards aligned, measurable annual goal based on
assessment data in the present levels. And then we will give you an opportunity to develop a
measurable annual goal based on assessment data that we provide.
At the very end, we will provide examples of how we develop measurable annual goals for these
your turn examples. And as I said, we will be answering your questions throughout. Michael’s going to
continue now with the context.
MICHAEL STOEHR: Good morning. We’re going to now just look at some background as to why there’s
an importance behind looking at writing measurable annual IEP goals that are aligned to the standards,
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as well as how this frames into the transition process in the state of Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, we
take seriously this charge of intending that all students develop proficiency in core subjects and
graduate from high school ready for college and career. So we need to consider that when we’re
preparing students for life after high school, that we take into account how best to achieve those three
post-‐secondary goal outcomes of going on for further training, employment, and living independently in
the community.
We also strive to ensure that each student achieves equitable outcomes regardless of
background, condition, or circumstances, and regardless of zip code or regardless of whether they have
a disability, or whether it’s a mild disability or a more significant or complex need. Equitable outcomes
include accessing all areas for students that are in our programs from ages 14 to 21.
When we look at the primary purpose of IDEA 2004, and if we look at that first paragraph of the
federal law, you’ll notice that it states that we are trying to prepare all students to be ready to go on for
further education, employment, and independent living. We want all our students with disabilities to
leave high school with the skill set that prepares them best for the future.
So what is secondary transition? And again, if we reference back to IDEA 2004, secondary
transition is a coordinated set of activities that does result in students being successful to go on for
further training, employment, and independent living. And the programs in school, and again starting at
age 14 until that student graduates, are leading them for success for further training, employment, and
independent living.
So you may be asking yourself, how do measurable annual goals fit into this big picture of
secondary transition? Well, measurable annual goals are part of that coordinated set of activities.
Measurable annual goals represent those skills that are essential to not only academic achievement, but
also to success in the workplace and the educational setting, and in the community setting of that
individual’s choice.
These next two slides are looking at the secondary transition process for students ages 14 to 21
who have IEPs in Pennsylvania. And when we look at the six-‐step process, you’ll notice that step five is
really looking at determining the measurable annual goals that address the skill deficits for those
students. I like to look at the map itself because I think it’s a good presentation of this process.
And just to quickly walk through this, we’re starting with a basis of assessment and looking at
what that individual student is interested in doing once they graduate from high school regarding going
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on for further training, employment, and independent living. Based on that assessment information, we
help that individual student and their family determine those post-‐secondary goals of going for further
training, employment, and independent living.
And then we look at where that student currently is functioning regarding their aptitude and
abilities. So we’re looking there at academic and functional skills. Then based on that information, we
look at developing the IEP. So starting with looking at the present education levels, making sure that
we’re documenting information regarding that student’s assessment. And not just documenting the
assessment, but we are looking at the information and we are analyzing it and coordinating that
information to then develop the student’s needs.
Based on the student’s needs, we look at then developing the transition section of the IEP, or
section three, also known as the grid in Pennsylvania. And in looking in that particular section, we look
at what that student wants to do as far as going on for further training, employment, and independent
living. And then we include those related activities in that section. Included in those related services and
activities are references to that student’s measurable annual IEP goals. And then we’re monitoring
progress for that student. Next we’re going to turn and look at kind of an overview of that standards
aligned system and the IEP. And Rosemary is going to continue with this section.
ROSEMARY NILLES: Most of you know that standards aligned, measurable annual goals are not required
by regulation for all students. In fact, standards aligned, measurable annual goals are only required in
reading or math for students who take the PSSA-‐M in reading or math. So teachers ask, why is it
important that I write standards aligned, measurable annual goals for my students?
Some teachers state that standards aligned, measurable annual goals are required in their
district, but they’re not quite sure how to do it. Some state that it takes extra time in an already busy
schedule. I’d like you to take about 20 seconds and jot down on your handout why you think it’s
important to write standards aligned, measurable annual goals.
These next two sections will provide rationale for standards aligned, measurable goals. And the
fourth section actually will provide some guidance on how to approach this important task. But really,
standards aligned, measurable annual goals are about accessing the general curriculum. So they
represent effective practice.
The first thing we need to do is take a brief look at the standards aligned system in Pennsylvania.
If we were to poll you, we would probably find out that most of you have been introduced to the six
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circles of PA standards aligned system. Remember that the standards aligned system is a collaborative
product of research and practice that identifies six components, which, if used together, will provide
schools and districts a common framework for continuous school and district enhancement and
improvement. And all six of these impact the development of IEPs.
Have you noticed the newest circle on the top-‐left? Some supportive schools supplies resources
and exemplars to promote active student engagement in a safe and positive learning environment in
order to maximize student learning. The other circles are standards; including assessment anchors;
assessment, fair assessments; the curriculum framework including big ideas, concepts, and competency;
instruction, which is really the heart of special education and the heart of education; materials and
resources, all of which help to support student achievement.
Let’s just take a few minutes to look at how these components impact the delivery of education
for all students, but in particular special education students and special education services for those
students. This is a screenshot of PA Standards Aligned System portal, otherwise known as the SAS portal.
And you can see the web address in the center there. And hopefully you’ve all taken time to navigate.
There are constantly upgrades and updates being made.
But this is really the answer to the question. The standards aligned system is the base for
content. And what is to be learned and what is to be taught? As well as how to most effectively teach
that content for all students. It’s not just a website. It’s making sure that all students receive instruction
according to the general education curriculum.
Since 1997, IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Act, has emphasized the importance of access
to the general education curriculum. Statewide assessments under No Child Left Behind tests content
that’s aligned with the standards framework of the general education curriculum. In the professional
literature from both the general and special education perspective, an overriding concern is to use
methods that result in progress relative to general education standards.
At this point in time, special educators are recognizing the need to be more systematic in their
thinking about the relationship between IEP goals and objectives and the general education curriculum.
And that’s why it’s effective practice and we recommend that academic goals, particularly reading,
math, and writing skills, are aligned to the PA academic standards assessment anchors and other
content on the standards aligned system. And we’ll talk about that now.
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The standards aligned system does provide different ways of representing the content. We, of
course, have the content standards and the assessment anchors. And the assessment anchors give us
guidance on those skills that are prioritized for assessment on the PSSA all the way to the eligible
content, which shows the limits of assessment.
Most helpful on the SAS portal are the actual views, and I’m going to step forward and show you
an example that’s not in your handout, but you could easily see this by logging onto the SAS portal and
clicking Standards. And I selected Algebra I as an example because we’re going to use that in a couple of
examples. And so this represents a screenshot, and you can see the area of mathematics and the
number, numbers systems and relationships, Algebra I. And you can go ahead and see the standards and
assessment anchors and eligible content. But look over to the right. You’ll see materials, resources, and
assessments for these two particular areas of eligible content, as well as this next anchor descriptor.
So again, another tool on the SAS portal is the vertical viewer. And that shows skills across the
grade levels. And that’s particularly helpful if you have a student who’s working below grade level,
which many of our students with IEPs are, of course. That shows how the skills change, but the content
remains very similar across the grade levels. So a student who is perhaps instructionally at a fourth
grade level in a skill such as numbers and -‐-‐ well, let’s use a reading skill. A skill such as main idea and
supporting details, you would see how that skill progresses across the grade levels.
The other part of content that is unique to Pennsylvania is our curriculum framework. And that
specifies what is to be taught at each grade level, and contains some important concepts such as big
ideas, concepts, and competencies. And I’ll explain those and give you some examples of them. And
again, the reason I’m explaining these is because these can help us build our measurable annual goals.
So the big ideas are declarative statements that describe concepts that transcend grade level.
Big ideas are essential to provide focus on specific content for all students. Many times teachers will use
big ideas as the basis for measurable annual goals aligned to the standards for students with very
complex support needs. Big ideas for -‐-‐ in 9-‐12 reading, there’s one big idea, and that’s comprehension
required and enhances critical thinking, and is constructed through the intention -‐-‐ intentional
interaction between reader and text. Whereas for algebra, there are eight big ideas.
Concepts describe what students should know, key knowledge as the result of this instruction.
In 9-‐12 reading, there’s one concept: essential content, literary elements, and devices inform meaning.
Competencies describe what students should be able to do, key skills as a result of this instruction. And
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they are specific to grade levels. And they would be very helpful for teachers in addition to standards in
selecting language that would inform measurable annual goals, because they’re behaviorally oriented.
There are many competencies for 9-‐12 reading. I’ll just review a few. Identify and evaluate
content between and among texts. Listen to the next one, very behavioral. Use and cite evidence from
the text to make assertions and to draw conclusions. Another one would be summarize, draw
conclusions, make generalizations from a variety of mediums. So again, we can use the big ideas,
concepts, and competence along with the standards and the assessment anchors in looking at content
and [inaudible] for developing measurable annual goals.
Next part of the standards aligned system is assessment. The standards aligned system provides
examples of differentiated assessment in the four types of assessments that we would like all student to
experience. That includes summative assessments and, of course, assessments such as PSSA, Keystone.
Formative assessment. Please, if you’re on the call, please mute your microphones and your phones.
Formative assessment, we call that assessment along the way. That gives us feedback to inform
instruction, things we see in classrooms. Might be [inaudible] out the door, the actual classwork,
responding in class. But it also includes progress monitoring of measurable annual goals. Very important
part of formative assessment. And these are things, again, we like to see in the present levels of a well-‐
written IEP.
Then there are the benchmark assessments, which assess progress towards grade level
standards. Examples commonly used in Pennsylvania are ForeSight, Assess to Learn, AIMSweb. And
lastly, we have diagnostic, which may or may not appear in your IEPs, but these are specific assessments
that look at specific strengths and weaknesses before and during instruction. So examples of diagnostic
assessments are GRADE, GMADE, KeyMath3, and also the Comprehensive Diagnostic Tools.
And I’d like to just talk about that assessment for a moment. The Comprehensive Diagnostic
Tools, you may see them shorted as CDT, you may hear people refer to them as CDT, are free online
assessments. They’re relatively new in Pennsylvania. They’re designed to provide diagnostic
information in order to guide instruction. So they will give you an idea of where your students are
functioning. They assist PA educators in identifying students’ academic strengths and areas of need. And
then they provide links to classroom resources to actually help instruct on those areas that are in need.
And they’re totally integrated and aligned with the standards aligned system. Again, we recommend
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strongly that these types of assessments, wherever possible, are referenced in the present levels of your
IEP.
Okay, and just quickly moving through the other circles, the standards aligned system contains
additional resources in order to help students reach standards. The standards aligned system on the
web portal, you’ll see an Instruction tab, examples of many different techniques, including videos,
including interventions to ensure meaningful access to the curriculum.
And when you think about interventions, think about systematic attempts by educators to
provide students with research-‐based support that ensure meaningful access to the general curriculum.
These database interventions ensure that students are provided with the supports they need to meet
and exceed grade level standards. Interventions are conducted in addition to grade level standards-‐
based core instruction. And often these interventions are tiered and based on student assessment data.
And for more information about that, you would want to look on the PaTTAN website for Pennsylvania’s
response to instruction and intervention model.
But again, for our students with IEPs, many of them are receiving interventions. So the web
portal will give you additional information. Also, another tab and another important component is
Materials and Resources. And some of the things that you will find there are voluntary model curriculum
for certain grade areas and content areas. Learning progressions, which are roads or pathways that
students travel as they progress towards mastery of skills needed for career and college readiness. So
that would be something to review.
Just an answer to a question. CDT stands for comprehensive diagnostic tool. We had a question
about that. Again, on the Materials and Resources, you may find unit plans that contain objectives,
essential questions, formative assessments. And you’ll know if these things exist when you look at the
standards. As I showed you that screenshot, you’ll see little icons for materials and resources.
And again, I‘ve already reviewed the safe and supportive schools, but think about how school
climate does impact all students, and particularly our students with IEPs. The safe and supportive
schools is designed to minimize barriers to learning, and includes information on engagement, safety,
and school environment.
So again, in summarizing, the standards aligned system represents effective practices in
teaching, in learning, in the curriculum of what is to be taught. It really represents the general education
curriculum. So using the standards aligned system for our IEPs makes sense if our students are going to
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access. Remember that the general education is not just the what we teach, not just the standards and
curriculum framework, but also the how. And the standards aligned system provides for that instruction,
intervention, materials and resources that allow students to access the curriculum. And of course, for
our students with IEPs, that how is often described in the specially designed instruction. And you’ll see it
here on your screen shortened as an SDI, as an acronym.
So the process for developing standards aligned IEPs begins with standards aligned assessment,
using the four types of fair assessments that we discussed. You’ll see our examples that we used today
do include standards aligned assessment. And then we write the present levels of academic
achievement, as Michael had gone through, on the road map. We develop our standards aligned
measurable annual goals. We select specially designed instruction that supports the individual student’s
needs.
We can’t emphasize enough the importance of individualized specially designed instruction. As
students get older and prepare to leave high school, their specially designed instruction will look very
different. It should look very different from the way it looked at lower grade levels because we’re
actually preparing the students to take ownership for their accommodations. They’ll need to do that as
they move into post-‐secondary education. So specially designed instruction will change over time.
And of course, progress monitoring on the measurable annual goals, and progress in the general
curriculum. And then the cycle begins over again. So Michael is going to review with us now some basics
of measurable annual goals in the IEP.
MICHAEL STOEHR: To start this section, I think some of the questions that folks may be thinking about
as they’re viewing today’s webinar is, how can standards aligned systems help me in writing my IEPs?
And what is a good starting point for writing good measurable annual goals? I think these are some
considerations to take. And when we look at how the standards aligned system can help in writing the
IEPs, I think the primary answer to that is really looking at where currently that student is functioning,
and then looking at that skill area.
So for example, in math, if the student is in ninth grade, what are those standards for math
based on the standards aligned curriculum? And then matching that or looking at where the student’s
current skill levels are, and then seeing where alignment can take place.
When we look at measurable annual goals, it’s important to keep in mind that the intent of
secondary transition is to demonstrate a coordinated set of activities. And that includes not only the
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activities that we traditionally have in secondary transition, but it also includes looking at the
measurable annual goals for that student.
It’s important to note too that for students ages 14 to 21, every measurable annual goal and
short-‐term objective supports the student’s post-‐secondary goals. We have a really, and we’ve said this
earlier, a high expectation of rigor and access to the general education curriculum for all students. To
state this another way, we look at effective practice that we’re stating in the transition grid, a reference
to all of the measurable annual goals that that student has. So in addition to the activities the student is
involved with, we’re also looking at including a reference to their measurable annual goals.
It’s important when we’re looking at writing measurable annual goals that we’re addressing all
of the skill deficits that the student has and that we’re prioritizing those needs, that we’re looking at
which areas that the student needs to work on for that IEP year which will have the greatest impact, and
really focus on those particular areas for that student. It’s important in writing the IEP goal that we’re
communicating expectations and projecting that student’s perform for that -‐-‐ student performance at
the end of one year. And it’s also important when writing the IEP goal that it contains countable,
measurable data, that we’re able to progress monitor that particular goal.
When we look at measurable annual goals, it’s also important to consider what they are not.
And I think this particular slide is really important so we can define how best to look at the student’s
specific needs, their skill deficits, and determine the basis for the goals. So when we look at what
measurable annual goals are not, first of all, they are not the curriculum for that school or that grade
level. If we just are looking at the curriculum, it’s not specific enough. It does not address that student’s
skill deficits.
Measurable annual goals are rarely course specific unless the course corresponds to the specific
need of that student. So for example, a math goal for a math course. Measurable annual goals should
address, again, the specific skills of that student. And they are not grades or passing of a course. The
goal should not be written to, you know, Johnny will achieve 75% in all of his courses in the 11th grade
year. That would not be an appropriate measurable annual goal.
Measurable annual goals are written for skills that can be expressed anytime throughout the
school day. They are not specific to a specific setting such as the special education classroom. The skills
identified in the measurable annual goals can be taught in the general education classes and monitored
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by both general and special education teachers. But remember, special education is a service and not a
place.
There are also, and when we have been doing trainings with school districts over the last four or
five years, a lot of concern and a lot of comments about, well, what are the, quote, transition goals? And
again, just to reiterate from a few slides back, all goals written in the IEP are considered transition goals
because they are helping that student achieve their post-‐secondary goals. They’re leading to that
student’s success and going on for further training, employment, and independent living.
And again, they are not the same as those post-‐secondary goals. And there has been a lot of
confusion, I think, because the post-‐secondary goals of further training, employment, and independent
living are also called goals, but those are long-‐range and those are occurring after the student leaves
school. What we’re really talking about today are those measurable annual goals, the goals the student
is working on within the course of that IEP year.
When we’re looking at developing measurable annual goals, it’s again important to build upon
skills to best help that student. And we’re really looking at what areas that that student needs to work
on that are going to make the biggest difference, the biggest change and improvements, for that
student over the course of this IEP year.
In our trainings, we frequently will talk about the importance of having clear and measurable
data or baseline data in the present ed levels in order to define what the skill deficits or the needs of the
student are, and then in order to write the goal. You should be able to go back and look at specifically
where’s the student starting? Where are their current skill levels? And then build upon that.
We now want to look at the four required parts of writing a measurable annual goal. And these
four parts are the conditions, the student’s name, the clearly defined behavior, and the performance
criteria. When we look at condition, this is really talking about the situation in which this goal will occur,
the materials used, and the setting where the evaluation will occur. When we’re looking at this, some
examples include the location or like during a lunch break. The materials that are going to be used, such
as a graphic organizer. The instructional strategies used, such as given a two-‐step direction. So what is
the condition around which this goal will take place, this skill area that’s being developed?
The student’s name is the next thing that needs to be contained in the measurable annual goal.
And again, IEPs are an individualized process and we have to make sure that the student’s name is
clearly stated. Some issues with this come in, especially with cutting and pasting using computer
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programs. We have seen this, again, frequently in districts where it really is an error, really it’s
something that occurs because we know how oftentimes people are really busy and they don’t go back
and necessarily proofread that goal. So we have seen students’ names incorrectly stated. Oftentimes the
pronouns he and she will be mistaken. So again, just to make sure as you’re writing the goal, that you
are going back and you’re proofing it to make sure that the student’s name is correct in those goals.
Next, looking at the clearly defined behavior. And basically you’re looking here is to explicitly
state what is it that that student is going to be doing. In doing training with teachers, one of the things
that we talk about in looking at behaviors, if you can close your eyes and visualize the student actually
doing or performing that activity, then that is probably a well-‐written, clearly defined behavior. In
aligning or looking at how the IEP goal aligns to the standards or anchors, when we look at the standards
aligned curriculum, we can obtain the basis for what would that behavior be that that student is going to
be doing.
The last part in writing a measurable annual goal in looking at this process is looking at the
performance criteria. And in this particular section, most folks have the criterion of how well. And that
is, you know, easily oftentimes the easy part to put in. It’s 90% or 80% accuracy. However, we really look
at performance criteria as having these three distinct parts. So as well as how well we want the students
to perform, so say for example at 85% accuracy level, we also need to look at how consistently do we
want the students to perform? In other words, how many times does this student need to perform the
task at 85% in order to know that the student has attained that skill, has mastered that skill? As we
know, student may be able to do something one time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have
mastered that skill.
And then we also need to look at the evaluation schedule, how frequently the progress will be
monitored for that student. In this particular slide, it’s showing us an example of a way of organizing the
writing of a measurable annual goal. And it contains the four steps that we just talked about. And we
have used this sheet and its features in actually writing the goals and filling in the various parts. It’s a
nice graphic organizer of how to look at writing measurable annual goals.
The following are a couple of non-‐examples of goals. And in this particular non-‐example for
Pam, you’ll notice that no skill was really involved. So it’s given instruction, Pam will maintain a least a
75% in her class each nine weeks over the course of the year. We’re not sure exactly what Pam needs to
work on. Again, getting back to what is the need of this student, what is the skill that she needs to work
on. And that’s very unclear in this goal.
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In this next goal, looking at Kevin’s reading goal, this goal is a non-‐example because it really is
containing many, many skill areas. You know, Kevin will read and understand works of fiction, non-‐
fiction in literature, as well as analyze the use of literary elements, including characterization, plot,
setting, theme, point of view, tone, et cetera 75% over the course of the year. There are so many
different variables in that goal that it’s really unclear as to what specifically Kevin needs to address this
year, what we’re actually going to be working on specifically.
Also, maintaining 75% over the year is not appropriate progress monitoring. Monitoring grades
does not equal monitoring progress. How could we monitor this goal in an ongoing manner? One of the
students has a two-‐week period where he’s at 50% or 100%. So when we’re looking at this particular
goal, again just to reiterate, some of the pieces that make it really not the best is, one, it’s not specific
enough to skills, and it really does not identify clearly how the progress monitoring is going to take place
for this particular student.
Okay, this next slide is looking at our alignment to goals. And Rosemary is going to go over it and
actually use this particular chart in a few of the examples that we’re going to be discussing today. But I
just wanted to state that when we’re writing goals, this is a good way of looking at this process, that we
have to have in present education levels the baseline information, the assessment data. And it’s not
enough just to have it listed, but we need to interpret that data and then utilize that to define what are
the skills a student needs to work on, what’s the baseline and the starting point.
Based on that baseline information, then the student’s needs are stated. And then, as I
mentioned earlier in the transition grid, we need to reference the measurable annual goal in the grid for
what that student is working on this year that’s going to help them -‐-‐ help him or her reach their post-‐
secondary goals. Then we have the goal written and then we look at how the progress monitoring will
be taken on that goal.
One of the things that we will do when we’re in training is we will go and look at a goal, and go
back and look in present education levels to see why is that student working on that specific goal area?
What is the need? And there should be a correlation to those.
Okay, next up Rosemary is going to move on and talk about writing standards aligned goals. We
did have one question, though, before we move on. And the statement is, why is visiting a college fair
not an appropriate IEP goal? The reason that visiting a college fair is not an appropriate IEP goal is the
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student does not have a specific skill deficit in visiting a college fair, actually going there. That particular
goal is really an activity.
And as we talk about looking at that grid section, we do have activities, and activities such as
meeting with an OVR counselor or going to a college fair. They’re great activities. They’re going to help
that student in, you know, achieving their post-‐secondary goal of going on for further training. However,
IEP measureable annual goals are based on skill deficits. So we have to look at what is that specific area
of need for that student?
So for example, in visiting a college fair, perhaps the student has communication needs. They
have difficulty in interacting with someone. Maybe it’s a speech goal. Well, that would be a skill deficit
area that you could possibly have for that student, but it wouldn’t -‐-‐-‐ the goal would be working on a
speech communication area, not attending the college fair.
Okay, with that, I’m going to turn this over to Rosemary and she’s going to continue with the
remaining bulk of this presentation on the end of the line process in writing goals.
ROSEMARY NILLES: Thank you. We have had a number of other questions, and I think most of them will
be answered as we go through this section, but there were a couple that I wanted to clarify right away.
And one of those was regarding the classroom diagnostic tool. And you often hear that referenced as
CDT. And that is an online, individualized, computer-‐based assessment that addresses -‐-‐ that can assess
the areas of reading and literature, math and science. And it’s only for students grades 6-‐12 in
Pennsylvania. It is free.
And how you would get more information about using it, I would go to your IU curriculum staff.
They’re very skilled. There have been a number of trainings in Pennsylvania. It is a relatively new tool.
Many of our schools are just beginning to use it or have just started. So you’ll see in the examples that
we show you later that there are some references to the type of data we can gather.
The point I want to make about assessments is that we can’t recommend any particular
assessment. And the standards aligned system, the fair assessments is simply saying that we need to
gather assessment from a variety of sources and a variety of types. We really can’t make a judgment
about a student’s level of functioning in reading or math, for example, based on one assessment let
alone based on their grades.
Places to go for examples, reading assessments might be on our PaTTAN website, our RtII
section. Look under secondary RtII toolkit. I can’t exactly tell you how to get it just now, but I think if you
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go to Secondary Response to Instruction and Intervention, you would find a link to the toolkit. You might
also find it under Resources.
There was another question about an assessment that gives grade level, and I think that was
maybe a reference to benchmark. Benchmark assessments do not provide a grade level. They simply
give us an idea of progress towards grade level standards, whether the students are meeting particular
standards. For example, the ForeSight assessment that is most commonly used uses a series of four
math assessments that assess standards and assessment anchors to be achieved by the end of the year.
So there are four similar assessments. They don’t gradually increase in skill. At the beginning of the year,
students don’t do as well because they haven’t been taught that content. Whereas toward the end of
the year, we should be seeing the vast majority of students meeting those grade level standards. So I
hope that clarifies those questions.
One more thing on the CDT. Because they are individualized, they don’t look the same for both
students -‐-‐ for all students. A student might begin in math at grade level, let’s say eighth grade level, but
may be given more difficult math problems if they are successful. Or they may drop down if they’re not
successful. But no two students look alike, and that is why it is not a benchmark assessment. However -‐-‐
and so it’s not a substitute for ForeSight. We get that question a lot. Two different types of assessment.
CDT is totally individualized. It can be given up to five, maybe six times a year. It can give us good
information on our students, but again, it’s not the only source of assessment information. And you’ll
see in the examples that we use, we never rely on just one assessment. And we try to integrate the
assessment data that we get.
There was another question on standards aligned, measurable annual goals. And we’ll go right
to the bottom bullet. And here it is in writing, standards aligned, measurable annual goals are required
in reading or math for students who take the PSSA modified in reading and math. So example -‐-‐ for
example, a student takes PSSA modified in reading, then their reading goal or goals should be absolutely
aligned to the standards. However, we don’t like to leave that statement without, again, a strong
recommendation that each of you look at the standards for all of your students with IEPs.
Standards aligned, measurable annual goals are derived from the PA academic standards and/or
the assessment anchors, the big ideas, the concepts or competencies. The examples we’ll show you
today are typically written to standards or assessment anchors, but you may use all of part of the other
things that I’ve mentioned. And I want to make that point too. You may not have a measurable annual
goal written to an entire standard. And you’ll see a couple of the examples are written to parts of
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standards. Again, they’re based on individual needs as described in the present levels of academic and
functional performance. Pardon that acronym, it’s a lot to write, but again, based on assessment data.
So let’s look a little more at the process of selecting skills. Not every goal must be based on
grade-‐level standards. Certainly if that wouldn’t meet the child’s individual needs. Sometimes students’
specific needs do fall outside of the standards aligned general education curriculum. For example, self-‐
care skills or self-‐help in particular, possibly travel skills. Many times for our students with more
significant need, they may fall outside of the general ed curriculum. However, we can also make a far
link to a standard.
So you’ll see that most of our goals are going to be -‐-‐ fall within the general education
curriculum. And that’s why this graphic is intended to depict a way of reconciling that required focus on
students’ specific needs. We are required to do that by IDEA 2004, but we’re also required to, as much
as possible, use the general education curriculum and provide that access. So standards aligned,
measurable annual goals fall within that middle ground. And we’ll provide additional information as we
go along.
So another question we ask is, how do we prioritize? Many of our students have multiple skill
deficits. Should we write a measurable annual goal for every skill deficit that we’re aware of that
assessment identifies? And we would say no. We will allow the students instruction in other areas and
their instruction, whether it be an intervention in addition to the general ed curriculum, we will allow
their instruction and the assessments to address many skill deficits. The question is, what prerequisite
skills or knowledge does the student really need to close the gaps between his or her present levels and
grade level standards?
Another way of asking that question might be, what skills or knowledge is the student going to
need to be successful in his or her post-‐secondary goals? If a student, for example, is struggling with
reading, they’re struggling with both fiction and non-‐fiction, while fiction is an important part of life and
will absolutely be assessed on the PSSA, possibly in their role as an auto mechanic or as a truck driver or
even in going to college to study engineering, non-‐fiction might give us more bang for the buck when we
prioritize this skill.
Prioritizing means not listing all the parts of the general ed curriculum as goals. And that was
one of the flaws of one of the goals we looked at. We’ve got to allow instruction in the general ed
curriculum to occur. But prioritizing means focusing on the most critical areas to close the gaps to set
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the student up for future learning goals, set the student up to be successful in the general education
curriculum, and set the student up for success in attaining his or her post-‐secondary goals.
So many students do have so many needs, so we have to make decisions about which particular
skills to address as measurable annual goals. And remember that the skill deficits that we list as needs in
that final section of the present ed levels, that section of needs, and many of you who have trained with
me know that I like to use a funnel to show that the information throughout the present levels tends to
be detailed. But when we get down to the strengths and needs and how the students’ disability affects
involvement and progress in the curriculum, we’re funneling through. We’re just skilling. We’re
concentrating that information. We’re not getting any surprises by that point. So anything we list in the
needs as a skill deficit needs to be addressed as a measurable annual goal.
But in consideration, think about endurance. Will the skill last beyond the particular class or
year? Is it a skill that the student will need in the adult world? Leverage. Will the skill serve the student
in multiple settings? Again, across the building. And that’s why we don’t write a goal for science or a
goal for physics class. Rather, we would write a communication goal, a writing goal, a reading goal for
comprehension, or perhaps a goal for decoding those words that tend to trip up our students in general
ed classes. We look across the curriculum, multiple settings. And of course we consider the PSSA
blueprint, which skills are considered high priority on the PSSA. But the PSSA blueprint is a great tool
because the skills that are assessed on the PSSA are important, high leverage, necessary, and enduring
skills.
The other thing is necessity. Is the skill important across the curriculum? Is it necessary for
success in the workplace and for post-‐secondary education and the community? So we can’t tell you
exactly when you have a student with multiple needs how to prioritize. That truly is up to the IEP team,
and that’s why we can’t tell you on a webinar this is what you should choose. But those are some things
that you should consider and share with your IEP team.
So which standards do we typically use? Well, certainly we use the standards anchors, big ideas,
concepts, and competencies in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, as well as math. And we do
have standards for algebra I and II and geometry. So those are where we’re going to draw the vast
majority of our academic goals. But I want you also to consider using the career education and work
standards. They’re wonderful for work habits and organizational skills. And the draft standards, and
again these are drafts, but you’ll find them on their downloads on the standards aligned portal, student
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interpersonal skills standards. And again, we’ve already said these aren’t required. It’s just good
practice.
So which measure -‐-‐ which academic skills need to have measurable annual goals? We see a lot
of confusion in the field, particularly when students are included in general education classes. And that’s
why Michael reviewed with you that measurable annual goals can be written for students and should be
written for students who are included in general education classes.
Teachers often wonder, well, how will I write a measurable annual goal if a student is in a
general education class for English, for literature, for algebra, geometry, or whatever the math course?
How can I write a standards aligned measurable annual goal? I have no way of monitoring. And the
message we give is special education shouldn’t be standing alone. We, along with our general ed
colleagues, need to find ways that are easy and doable that will help assess the skills on a regular basis
in the general ed classroom. And monitoring grades are only one teeny, tiny part of looking at skill
development.
What the question here is, if the student needs to develop skills in reading, writing, or math in
order to access, participate, or progress in the general curriculum and reach their post-‐secondary
education goals, then we do need to write a measurable annual goal for those skills because now
they’re not just curriculum, they’re skills. We’re going to prioritize those skills as measurable annual
goals.
So now we’re going to show you the process that we use at PaTTAN across our initiatives as far
as steps for developing a standards aligned IEP goal. And we’re going to walk you through this process
with a couple of examples, and then we’re going to let you take a turn.
First, we begin with reviewing the present levels of academic and functional achievement and
functional performance. And your well-‐written present levels should contain an awful lot of information
that will help you guide you towards knowing what’s most important. You identify your student need in
the present levels and you identify where their skill deficits are, but then step three is to prioritize those
needs as skills to be developed. And that is your list of needs, the funneling through as I like to describe
it. Those needs with a capital N need to be developed or addressed as measurable annual goals.
If you haven’t already looked at the standards, anchors, or elements in the curriculum
framework that correlates with your needs, now is the time to do that. However, it’s possible that
you’ve already, as you wrote your present levels, you were already considering which standards were
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prioritized. But if you haven’t done it, this is the time. And then after considering all of the above, then
you’re going to write the goals to include the clearly defined action or behavior. And again, you’ll get
that from the standards, anchors, and curriculum framework. You’ll write the condition and you’ll write
all three parts of the performance criteria.
We found that in training, talking just about the parts of the measurable annual goals weren’t
necessarily -‐-‐ wasn’t necessarily sufficient to help teachers to really grasp, what do I really want the
student to do? And so, as a breakout of step five that I’m showing you now, this is really step five, how
are we actually going to address that? How are we going to know if the student is developing that target
skill that we’ve just identified? And so what I like to ask teachers is, what do I want the student to
actually do to show that she or he is learning this skill? And that’s where we may use or paraphrase
language from the standard.
With what materials or under what conditions? What will the student be doing? How will we
measure the skill and how often will we measure that skill? How well must the student perform the
skill? How consistently? Because we just can’t go on with an IEP goal forever. We’ve got to reach an end
point when we know they’ve achieved it. And what other assessments forms of data will also indicate
that he or she is progressing towards the goal. Now I went through that quickly, but on the examples I’m
going to show you. we’ll dig through those in some depth.
Many of you have seen this example of Caroline’s tried and true. If you’ve been in Indicator 13
training, you’ve met Caroline. And she wants to be a cosmetologist, but she’s got some pretty
substantial behavioral problems right now, and so she’s had an FBA, a functional behavioral assessment.
And a positive behavioral support plan has been written for her IEP. Her IEP includes measurable annual
goals for all of these areas: algebra, budgeting, writing fluency. She’s one of those kids who just doesn’t
like to write. And writing tasks are actually an antecedent for behavioral outbursts, so she’s got a
measurable annual goal for that. She also needs to improve her organizational skills and certainly she
needs a behavioral goal to replace those outburst behaviors.
So this next slide does contain a lot of text, and I don’t like to do this to you on a webinar, but
what I want to show you here is that we have just looked at algebra, okay? So our recommendation, and
again it’s not a requirement, but a recommendation for writing present levels is to take apart, look at
your academic areas in particular, reading, writing, and math, and address them as a whole so that
we’re looking at the student as a whole.
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So I’m going to quickly walk you through this. She’s included with co-‐teaching. She’s
cooperative, but she’s missing assignments already. What accommodations work for her? Breaking
assignments into chunks, frequent chunks, frequent feedback and encouragement, use of graphic
organizers and drawings.
Okay, now we get into -‐-‐ so we already know what specially designed instruction works. Now we
have some -‐-‐ this would be benchmark assessments. She’s basic on her ForeSight. Remember, she’s in
tenth grade. They do assess 11th grade standards. [inaudible] are increasing, so she’s improving. But look
where her errors are: algebraic concepts, particularly equations and inequalities, with great
improvement in numbers operations. Okay, this is consistent with data obtained on the classroom
diagnostic assessment for algebra. That last statement, for those of you who have had Indicator 13
training, is new.
Okay, a little bit of background. She expressed pride in having measured her last year’s goal on
numbers and operations. She’s going to continue to practice numbers and operations, so it’s not going
to be a goal, but she needs those skills for her cosmetology program. They’re essential. So we didn’t
want to ignore those. And she’s also going to practice numbers and operations in her measurable annual
goals. So budgeting, and that supports her independent living goal.
Okay, now we have progress monitoring information. She’s been using the AIMS algebra
foundation probes. And this is a 42-‐item, 50-‐point measure designed to reflect five core concepts and
skills viewed as the foundations of algebra. And it’s done in five minute probes. She’s already been doing
it and she started at seven correct answers, and she’s already at 13. If she attains 22 correct answers for
those probes, that would be indicative of improved overall skill and fluency in foundations.
And she also enjoys this, which is important for a student with behavioral needs. That feedback,
that seeing their progress, it’s critical. So you have a summary of just her math. We prioritized her needs
because she is in a math class, and this algebraic concepts is needed for her to be successful in that and
subsequent math classes. So we went and looked at the standards and the assessment anchors. We
could have used either. We could have also selected a competency. But we went with this assessment
anchor because it seems to match what we’re seeing in class, and it’s a very high leverage skill.
Okay, so now let’s go through that process. And if you were her teacher, I’ll think out loud with
you and we’ll think about, well, what do we actually want her to do? We already know that we have a
nice probe in place. Well, what we really wanted to do was solve problems, especially problems with
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equations and inequalities. Okay, well, what materials? We’ve got a nice progress monitoring tool in
place, so why wouldn’t we want to use that? So let’s use what we already have.
But how are we going to measure it and how often will we measure it? Well, we’ll use those
algebra probes for five minutes, as they were designed, and we’re going to do it every two weeks, as
designed. Well, how well should she perform it, remembering she’s only at 13 correct answers now?
And we had said on the previous slide that she needs to get to 22 at the end of a year’s time. Not in nine
weeks, but in a year’s time.
How consistently does she do it? If she gets 22 correct answers once, will we be satisfied that
she’s attained the goals? Well, we know that our students with disabilities need to do things more than
once. So we said in this example three out of five consecutive probes. We could have probably said
three consecutive probes and that would have been helpful as well.
But we know that just these probes are absolutely not sufficient. We had a lot of data,
remember, in her present levels, so wouldn’t we want to look at other sources of data as well? And yes,
we will. We’ll look at her classroom formative assessments, the things her teachers see in the classroom
day to day that inform instruction. We’ll also continue to monitor ForeSight and CDP data, and we’ll
send those home as well with the progress reports.
So we’ve gone through the process. How would that look on the IEP form? What I’m showing
you now is exactly what we just talked about. But did you find it a little easier to look at this and think it
out, map it out in your head first before you go to write it? So now we have it in IEP language. Given a
biweekly algebra I curriculum-‐based assessment, Caroline will solve equations and inequalities,
increasing her score from 13 to 22 correct answers per five-‐minute time period for three out of five
consecutive probes.
Notice that we used part of the anchor. How will we monitor her progress? Well, we’re going to
make a graph and count her correct answers. And she’s going to be involved in that graph. And then
there’s that additional data. We’re going to continue to gather other data from class, from the
ForeSight, and we’re going to send a report home twice per nine weeks.
Now remember, if her school sends a report home to all students twice per nine weeks, then
Caroline would also have to have a report twice per nine weeks. But maybe that’s our decision because
this is a critical area. Maybe mom and the team would prefer to see a report more frequently, okay?
Remember, we must send progress reports as often as students without IEPs. So this is an IEP team
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decision in this case to send it more often. Or it might be that that’s the practice in her school. Many of
the schools I’ve worked in have sent progress reports at the midpoint of the nine weeks. Remember,
this is an example. You’ll see that on all our slides.
So remember, Michael went through the alignment. Let’s look at how Caroline’s math flows
through her IEP. In the present levels, we’ve shortened basic on ForeSight, errors in equations, currently
13 correct. That’s what we saw in the present levels. So this is how we wrote it as her needs for her
present levels: to improve skills with each algebraic concepts, including solving equations and
inequalities.
Remember, those of you who have had Indicator 13 training, know that we’re asking you and
we want you to show that skill in the grid. It’s important enough of a skill that it belongs in the grid to
show that it’s part of our coordinated set of services. So we pretty much set it the same way we set it as
a need. We could have written it a different way. There’s that goal we just reviewed, and there’s the
progress monitoring that they’re going to chart the number of correct answers.
And there’s her progress, remembering that she has a full year, and so this is only between
October and December. And she certainly looks like if she continues to progress as she has been, that by
the end of a year’s time, she will met her goal of 22. And maybe before the end of a year’s time. In that
case, we might adjust her IEP or choose another goal, calling the team together.
I hope that example based on a fictitious student made sense to you. Let’s try another example
of a student who has a reading need. And Jen is in ninth grade with a learning disability in reading and
writing. She’d like to become a nurse or a nurse’s aide. At this point, she knows she’s interested in
helping people get well. She’s progressing in an intensive reading intervention, so she is still getting
instruction in a reading intervention in a learning support classroom, but she’s accessing the curriculum
for English and her other areas. She does have other measurable annual goals for decoding, for writing,
and math problem solving.
So again, a fictitious example, but maybe typical of your students. Now we’re going to look at
her present levels only for reading. The rest of her present levels might include information about math,
but this is just reading. So again, a little bit of background information, information on her intervention.
She’s made a year’s worth of growth in oral reading fluency during the current IEP, now reading 110
words per minute at a sixth grade level with 97% accuracy. And so typically if a student -‐-‐ in this case,
the IEP team decided to discontinue oral reading fluency as a formal IEP goal. She’s still going to be
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monitored, but it won’t be her IEP goal. She’ll have a different goal for working on decoding longer
words.
First, we use the San Diego Quick Assessment, which is really just a ballpark that was done in
December. We like to include dates of when assessments were given. Again, it’s not a requirement, but
it helps us to know where they were and when. So she’s growing on the San Diego Quick Assessment,
suggesting that instructional level is sixth grade and frustration level is eighth grade. And her most
recent scores on ForeSight are low-‐basic.
Now you can see already we have a number of sources of assessment data. We didn’t go with
just one. Okay, a little more analysis of the ForeSight, and here’s also classroom assessment data. We
don’t want to give just scores. We want to analyze what do those scores tell us. So here’s the paragraph
that does that. And we tally September and January. They indicate she struggles particularly with
summarizing and identifying key concepts in fiction and non-‐fiction, and interpreting and analyzing
concepts and organization of non-‐fictional texts. We get this information right from both assessments.
But the CDT, comprehensive diagnostic tool, indicates that other areas of weakness also include
persuasive techniques and text organizational skills. So she’s got multiple needs. How are we going to
prioritize for her? We gave her some additional probes because we were concerned about that
summarizing and identify. So we gave her some additional probes that the CDT couldn’t give us and just
to get an idea. And we’ve got some baseline data that she is only a 40-‐50% accuracy on summarizing and
identifying key concepts at grade level. So we know that this is something important.
Classroom teachers give us input for the IEP, and that’s why we include. She’s keeping up with a
lot of assistance, specially designed instruction, pre-‐teaching, re-‐teaching, use of graphic organizers such
as the concept map or vocabulary map, and oral presentations. She may be using accessible
instructional materials. So her priority for reading is to develop comprehension skills with summarizing
and identifying key concepts. Would you agree that that skill has leverage, high utility, and endurance?
And it’s also going to be assessed on the PSSA when she takes it in a few years.
Now we noted also that she needs to employ decoding strategies for longer words. That’s not
what we’re going to talk about any further, but I just wanted you to be aware that she would also have a
goal for decoding. And we won’t be showing that, but addressing her in a holistic -‐-‐ addressing reading
holistically. We wanted to acknowledge there were both.
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But just looking at this comprehension skill, that’s the goal we’re focusing on. So we looked at
standards, we looked at competencies. In this case, we simply made the decision to work from an
assessment anchor. And so we looked at this particular anchor descriptor and right down to the eligible
content, summarizing major points, processes, and events of a non-‐fictional text as a whole. So we’re
going to use language from these standards in developing her measurable annual goals.
So now, again, this is an I do, a demonstration. So you can think along and you may find that you
would have done it differently. And that’s the beauty of IEPs, that they don’t have to be identical. The
examples I’m showing you are simply examples. There is not one way to do this. But I’ll show you our
thinking.
What do we want her to do? Well, we want her to do exactly what we just said. We want her to
be able to summarize major points and key details of passages, whether she reads them silently or
orally. Because most of the time she’s going to be reading silently, but we may want to check to see how
it goes orally. But how are we going to do that? With what materials? Under what conditions? Well, how
about if we select non-‐fiction passages, roughly 200 words, from her grade level content? That way we’d
know for sure she’s accessing the curriculum. But we know she’s going to need specially designed
instruction. We know that she does well with graphic organizers, so a concept map or some sort of
graphic organizer of her choice. She may work with a teacher to select the one that is most helpful for
her.
How are we going to measure the skill? Well, we want her to read and summarize. And we want
her to be able to do it orally or in writing. We may have her complete that graphic organizer. We may
have her write it in a couple of sentences. We may have her do it orally. We don’t want just one way.
And the teacher’s going to use a rubric to score how she would do on that. Will she hit all of the key
points? Will she -‐-‐ will she include all the details or will she leave off any?
In answer to a question that is sure to come up, we’re not showing a rubric now. That would be
something that would be designed at a particular school. But I know if you would go onto the Internet
and google rubrics, you would find some. But rubrics for a skill like this are often custom made, so be
careful about just using something that doesn’t hit exactly what you’re looking for.
Okay, back to how well do we want her to do it? Well, on that rubric, if it’s a five-‐point rubric,
we want her to get at least four of the five points. Ideally, we’d like her to get all five, but minimally four.
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How consistently? If she did it once, we wouldn’t be satisfied. But if she does it four consecutive trials,
we’d feel like she’s attained the skill and ready to move onto another skill that’s essential.
And what other assessments would we use to give us that information? Well, we’d of course
continue to use ForeSight, CDT, classroom formative assessments. What we wanted to get away from
here is simply writing down tests, quizzes, homework. We see that frequently in IEPs. We wanted to
show you that we’re using something very specific, a very specific progress monitoring tool in addition
to these other things that would include her tests and quizzes and her daily performance.
Those things alone don’t really tell us how she’s doing unless -‐-‐ they don’t give us enough
specific information unless we’re pulling out this particular skill. So if her classroom tests and quizzes are
pulling out this skill, if we can identify those questions that hit the skill, that’s great and we should be
doing that, but we simply can’t say that maintaining a 70% on all of her classroom tests will tell us if
she’s improving or how she’s improving on this skill that we prioritized.
And there’s our measurable annual goal. It’s exactly what I reviewed with you. Given that non-‐
fiction passage, we chose her two classes that would be easiest to do this with. And a graphic organizer.
Notice that a little bit of specially designed instruction is built into the condition. Then she’ll do her
clearly identified behavior. She’s going to summarize. She’s going to earn at least four of five points on a
scoring rubric on four consecutive biweekly trials. This is how often we’re going to do it. Okay?
And there’s the standard. Some of you may ask, is it required to list that assessment anchor or
standard under the goal? No, it is not. We’re doing this for training purposes. So your supervisor or you
as a supervisor may require your teachers to do it, but it is not required by PDE Bureau of Special
Education. However, we’re showing you this because it shows the link and it’s good practice. So many of
your school district supervisors will say, I do want you to list where you got that. And sometimes just
listing the number isn’t helpful because, unless we’re very, very familiar with those standards or anchor
numbers, listing the number isn’t really going to tell us the skill.
So again, how are we going to monitor progress? We’re going to have her scores on the rubric
tracked. And again, we like students to take ownership. So she’s going to graph her own progress. And
these are those other assessments that we’ll also be looking carefully at.
In this case, we could have said every nine weeks, once per quarter, but we wanted to show you
that that’s not necessarily the way that all goals will be recorded. For example, a behavioral goal might
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be recorded every week. And Caroline, the example we used before, her goal was reported every week
because it was critical.
In this case, we listed two times per quarter and maybe that’s her school’s practice, that every
student gets a quarterly report of progress and a report at the midpoint. So again, you need to look at
your school practices, but minimally you must do what your school does for all students.
Okay, and here’s her alignment. We summarized her present levels. This is how we described
her need, developing comprehension skills for summarizing key concepts. And we wrote it pretty much
the same way in the grid. We listed it in the grid because it’s part of her coordinated set of activities.
And so we note them in the grid. And then we listed the goals again and we summarized how she’s
going to record her scores.
Okay, hopefully that was clear to you. Give you a moment just to regroup and we’ll do one more
example before we give you the opportunity to work on your own. Now Brad is also a fictitious student,
and the photographs I’ve used on these are not real students. Well, they are from Microsoft Office, so
they’re public domain, so these are not real students.
And he’s in 11th grade, he’s 18, and he’s going to graduate at 21. And Brad receives autistic
support services for part of his day. Now he is included for family and consumer science, health, and
physical education. And his IEP is going to cross over year to year, and he’s already planning to take
video production. He likes computers even though his literacy skills are quite low, as you’ll see. And part
of his day is taking place in the community to prepare him for his adult life and to prepare him for goals.
He’s interested possibly in something clerical or with computers, or possibly in food preparation. He
does not want to be a food server, but he might work well in food preparation. So we’re exploring goals
for him at this point. And he doesn’t like crowded settings, by the way.
His measurable annual goals are based on his need, and so he’s going to have a goal for
vocabulary, another goal for comprehension, a goal for practical money skills because he is working and
planning to live in the community. He needs work on time management and following a schedule. He
needs work on writing tasks. He needs to be able to follow two and three step directions. We know he’s
pretty good at one step directions. He also, because of the nature of his disability, has some issues
around self-‐regulation. And so he’ll have goals for self-‐regulation as well as pragmatic communication.
So you can see his goals are going to be individualized. But we’re only going to focus on one of
those goals now, and that will be vocabulary. And in describing vocabulary, we do need to look at his
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comprehension, so this present levels that we’ll see and they’re detailed, but I’ll go through them
quickly.
Just to give you an idea, he’s decoding at a mid-‐second grade level. And notice that we use
Brigance in this place. It’s a screening tool. It is not a detailed diagnostic. But we also use the Woodcock
Reading Mastery test, which is an example of a diagnostic assessment. They both use word lists.
He seems to be strong in word recognition, but we didn’t feel that that was enough information
to write a goal, so we looked at other assessments. We looked at the reading comprehension vocabulary
grade placement test. And that uses groups of five words. It’s from the Brigance. And the student has to
show which one of the five doesn’t belong with the others. So it’s definitely into comprehension and
vocabulary.
Well, on this brief assessment he was fine at first grade level, but at second grade level he only
got one out of three correct answers. So we’re seeing that his comprehension is breaking down. Again,
on the Brigance reading grade placement test, his comprehension breaks down at the first grade level.
And we also saw that on the comprehension -‐-‐ passage comprehension subtest of the Woodcock
Reading Mastery test. We have it shortened there. It uses modified closed passages and he couldn’t go
beyond first grade level.
So we’re zeroing in on some important information about him. He’s a good decoder. He could
decode words on the Brigance pre-‐employment list. That includes words such as personal data, union,
other words, interview, but he couldn’t explain them. So we know that he’s got some issues around
vocabulary. Not just reading vocabulary, but hearing and spoken vocabulary.
He’s been using a sight word program along with high interest reading materials. He’s
progressing through the second grade level, but he needs a lot of supports. Recent probes show used
words, sentences, and phrases. And they’re showing his strength is retention of sight words vocabulary.
So you’re seeing a pattern here. When he’s given assessments at ten-‐word intervals, as his reading
program does, he’s pretty good on his assessment, whether they’re the ten-‐word intervals or even on
cumulative assessments. So he seems to be able to retain words once he learns them, but he’s having
trouble with meaning.
And then we give information on his current reading goal. He did master that goal of learning 40
new words from the community, functional words related to work. And he’s at a 90% accuracy over
mixed probes. So in other words, when we mix up those words in isolation on short sentences using a
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variety of print formats, he’s at 98% accuracy. And yet on a recent probe, he could only explain about
half of those words or use them in sentences or to answer questions. So we really need to help him
expand his reading, hearing, and speaking vocabulary. And you can see that the speech language
pathologist would be a critical part of working on this goal.
So here’s the specially developed -‐-‐ designed instruction: short steps, frequent feedback,
repetition, visual cues, positive reinforcement, and some text-‐to-‐speech software. Now some
information with the speech language pathologist. We like to see integration of information. If we’re
talking about reading and the connection between reading and oral language, then that information
makes sense.
So his SLP concurs. He struggles with complex language and meaning, multiple-‐meaning words,
new vocabulary, and inferential skills. And she summarized or he summarized the test of adolescent and
adult language, which is shorted as the TOAL-‐4. That’s an individual diagnostic test of listening, speaking,
writing, and text comprehension. His lowest scores were on spoken analogies, word derivation, and
word opposites. Again, these are skills that involve manipulation of words and concepts in our heads as
well as -‐-‐ and they indicate how we might do on other reading tasks. And the speech pathologist did
include a detailed report on page seven of that hypothetical IEP. Remember, this is an example. It’s a
fictitious example.
So at a recent staffing, Brad’s team discussed the need to expand his use of vocabulary
explaining and using new words. This will help in reading comprehension, but it will also support his
pragmatic language. And we made the connection to his post-‐secondary goals. These skills are not only
needed for success in his general education classes, but also needed to help him attain his employment
goal of clerical or food preparation, and accessing the community with supports.
So again, examples, but we’re trying to show you how you can weave together information from
a variety of assessments, from a variety of sources, and from a variety of personnel. So we’re looking at
integrating.
His priority needs: expanding his vocabulary, explaining and using new words in content areas
and related to work or community experiences. So you may see some of the words he works on drawn
from family and consumer science, maybe phys ed, maybe next year from his video production class.
We’re looking at high utility words, words that will serve him in conversation, words that will serve him
in both classes and in the community.
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There is the standards connection. It’s a near link, but this is a grade level standard even though
he is only reading somewhere between a first and a second grade level. I want you to see how we were
able to make that connection with grade level standards. Now clearly his specially designed instruction
and the material we use will be adapted to meet his individual needs.
Okay, let’s go through that process again and you’ll see the thinking strategy that we used.
Again, you may think of it differently, but this is one way to do it. So the first question is, what do we
actually want him to do? Remember, we said that he’s having trouble using words. Even though he
retains them visually, he’s not able to use them in conversation and sentences. He’s struggling with
meaning of words. So we’d like him to show that he knows new words by reading and then explaining
using a sentence or answering questions. We want him to demonstrate understanding. So how will we
do that? What materials can we use or under what conditions?
We decided to use new vocabulary lists from his classes or from the community. Now, of course
we’re only going to introduce a few at a time. And for the purposes of this measurable annual goal, we
estimated that 60 in a year’s time would be reasonable. Maybe it’s a low estimation. Maybe if our
methods are successful, he’ll attain this goal in six months or at the end of a semester. And that would
be great because then we could notch it up. But for now, we’ll go with 60.
How will we measure that skill and how often will we measure it? Well, we’re going to -‐-‐ every
week, we’re going to use a three-‐point rubric to assess his understanding of those words. We’re going to
pick words that have already been taught, so if he’s been taught ten words, then we’ll pick three or six
of them. We’ll pick six to begin with. If he’s already been taught 25 words, then we’ll mix them up and
pick some more. So in other words, we may have them on cards, we may have them on lists, we may
have them in different print formats. We may even show them -‐-‐ show him those words in connected
text. In fact, we should because we want him to be able to access these words in a variety of situations.
So how well do we want him to do it? Remembering this is a year’s time. Well, by the end of the
year, we’d like to be able to pick any ten out of those 60 words, any ten mixed up, and have him get at
least two out of three points minimally. Better yet, three out of three points. How consistently? We
know that once isn’t enough, so we want him to demonstrate that above skill four weeks in a row. So we
would be mixing up those words for four weeks in a row. If he can do that, tell us what the words are,
use them in a sentence, use them in conversation, we’re at least knowing that he’s beginning to be able
to use those words.
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What other ways will we know? Well, certainly in our day to day classroom assessments, we’ll
try and engage him in conversation. Another adult perhaps will ask his general ed teachers -‐-‐ we will ask
them, but perhaps his supports coordinator or if he has a TSF to make sure that they’re using those
words with him at home or in the community. And certainly parents and other caregivers. So we’ll be
looking to see that those words are generalized. And we don’t want it to be rote. We’d like him to be
able to use those words in a variety of sentences.
This is how it looks on the goals. Remember, this is the end of the year goal. This is the annual
goal. So this is how it will look in a year’s time. In a moment, we’ll show you how it looks broken out. I’ll
let you read that yourself. Notice below the reference to the standard. Again, not required, but just a
good idea. His scores on the rubric and other scores I will show you on the next slide will be graphed on
a teacher tracking form.
But again, we’re going to be looking for other sources of data, so the speech language
pathologist will be gathering that data, general teachers, and other members of Brad’s team will report
this progress every nine weeks, although we may have chosen to say we’ll record it every third week.
That’s the team’s decision.
Now Brad, because he would be taking the alternate assessment, needs short-‐term objectives.
So what we’re doing on the next slide is breaking out that task into smaller chunks. And there are many,
many ways to break out short-‐term objectives. In this case, I will read it because this is being closed
captioned. We won’t be using a rubric for the first two short-‐term objectives. We’ll be simply using that
data collection form and then move to the rubric. So he would begin with any six random selected
words from 15 from those content classes or related to work or community. So read and explain the
meaning with 80% accuracy before consecutive weekly trials.
And then we move to give him eight randomly selected words from a list of 30. He’ll read and
use each one in a sentence and answer questions with 80% accuracy. So we’ve notched it up. Here we
were simply reading and explaining. And the third short-‐term objective is any ten from a list of 45 words.
We want him to do all three: read, orally explain, use the word in a sentence, and answer questions. And
now we’ve moved to the rubric, scoring at least two out of three for four consecutive. And that moves
us back to the final goals, using ten words from 60.
Let’s look at the alignment again. Brad learns and retains new sight words, but can only use or
explain about 60% of the new words that he’s learned. So we prioritized. It’s important that we expand
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his vocabulary, explaining and using new words in content areas and related to community and work
experiences. In the grid, this is part of his set of -‐-‐ coordinated set of activities, so we’re going to give
extra effort to teaching and monitoring progress on those skills. So we listed it pretty much the same
way. There’s the goal, reading and orally explaining any ten words out of 60. And there’s how we’re
going to monitor progress.
This is what we’re looking for and you should be looking for in your IEPs. Not this example, but if
you’ve stated it as a need, for example if you in your IEP for a student, no matter what their need, had a
vocabulary need, did you give baseline in your present levels? Did you list it in the grid? Remember, you
don’t need to write out the entire goal in the grid. You just reference it, okay?
So did you write a measurable annual goal for it? Sometimes we see reading listed as a need,
and yet there’s no measurable annual goal and no progress monitoring. Sometimes we see measurable
annual goals, for example for writing, and yet it’s not listed as a need and there’s no baseline data in the
present levels. So we really want to emphasize the idea of flow in the IEP, the idea of alignment, that
what you say in the present levels if you prioritize it as a need, then it needs to appear in the grid and it
needs to have a detailed measurable annual goal and progress monitoring. For every one of your goals,
whether you have two goals or whether you have ten goals, this is the process. And you should be able
to look back and see that alignment for every one of them. And in our Indicator 13 trainings, we do -‐-‐
when we work individually with teachers, we often bring them back to this and have them look for those
things.
Okay, this isn’t in your PowerPoint right here, but again, just summarize it. We showed you
standards aligned assessment. We showed you present levels of academic achievement. We showed
you standards aligned measurable annual goals. And we showed specially designed instruction. I think I
forgot to show you Brad’s, but it’s on your slide. And we told you how we would monitor progress, and
we gave you an example of Caroline’s progress monitoring, how it looks. But I hope if you’re a teacher or
a supervisor on this webinar that you would be able to take those three goals and develop a progress
monitoring system for that.
Just a couple of reminders when you’re finalizing your goals and when you’re writing your goals
to consider these three key concepts. Does the goal or short-‐term objective build important skills?
Whether your student is a learning supports student with minimal needs for specially designed
instruction, or whether your student has significant needs, does the goal build important skills that will
allow that student to be successful in the curriculum and in their life after high school?
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And does that goal, does each goal address prioritized needs from the present levels? Does it
reflect, if appropriate, standards, anchors, or big ideas, concepts, and competencies from the curriculum
framework? And is it age-‐appropriate and individually appropriate? Does your goal or short-‐term
objective contain all four required parts? The condition, which may include specially designed
instruction? The student’s name? The clearly defined behavior? Can you actually close your eyes and see
it happen?
And the performance criteria? How well you want the student to do it, how consistently, how,
and how frequently will we be monitoring progress? Remember, how frequently we’re monitoring
progress is not the same as how often we’re recording the process. two very different things. How
frequently is how frequently we’re assessing the skill, collecting that data, charting our data. Whereas
progress reporting is how often are we summarizing that data and sending it home to other team
members and family. Okay, so those are the four required parts.
And the third question, is it measurable? Can the data collection strategy be implemented? And
we always like to ask, would a student, parent, or another teacher be able to describe exactly what the
student will be able to do in a year’s time? Students should be able to describe what their goals are.
They should understand their goals, what they’re working on, what their specially designed instruction
is, and how they’re progressing towards their goal. That’s part of development of self-‐determination and
self-‐advocacy skills.
Is it written in a way that a parent or another team member could understand it? And how will
one know? Sometimes goals don’t have an end point, and that’s why we’ve been particular to show you
the measurable annual goals. Always tell how consistently. When will they reach that end point? When
is that goal considered mastered and it’s time to move onto something else? Most importantly, when
you write your goal, would another teacher, your colleague, or if a student moved to another district
and that IEP was implemented at least for a while, would another teacher understand how you are
measuring progress and collecting data?
Now we’re going to give you a chance. And so I’m going to introduce to you three students. And
I’m looking at the time and this will be a brief introduction. I’m going to ask you to work alone or with a
partner. Select William, who has a writing goal; Jason, math; or Celine, self-‐advocacy. We’re providing
you with information from present levels, IEP development process. Remember that table that we used.
We’ll give you the standards or assessment anchors. And we’ll give you the finalizing the goals slide
blank. And then we’ll debrief and we’re going to share completed examples at the end of the session.
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Remember the steps. This is just here for your guidance. Okay, William is an eighth grader
interested in forestry or trucking. He has measurable annual goals for writing, reading, math, and
organizational skills. This focuses on his writing. Included in eighth grade class, intensive instruction on
decoding, uses text-‐to-‐speech to support access to curriculum. In the area of writing, he willingly
attempts short answers, so it’s not a problem -‐-‐ it’s not a question of willingness or fluency. He’s even
able to verbalize or to use a graphic organizer to organize his ideas and stay on topic. But he’s got
trouble with errors. He did meet his most recent goal. And to summarize, he has run-‐on sentences,
missing articles, spelling errors, errors in comma and apostrophes. So his needs is around writing
convention. And there’s the standard that matches. There’s the process that you would go through if
you’re working on William.
Now Jason is a ninth grader included in algebra class. A post-‐secondary goal of working with
computers and has measurable annual goals for reading and comprehension and writing. Little bit of
background: he’s in a co-‐teaching class. We listed accommodations. He’s making it in class, but we know
he’s gotten aides. He’s doing his work. Important information from the teacher. He seems to understand
the concepts. However, his computation skill deficits are slowing down his overall work, causing errors.
That’s interrupting his fluency. He did master his previous goal of improving computation with whole
numbers.
A little bit of information on ForeSight and PSSA, and information from the CDT, comprehensive
diagnostic tools. Sorry for the typo. He took the comprehensive diagnostic tool for algebra I. It shows
that he’s struggling with linear equations and inequalities. So we did a little more analysis using the CDT
and saw that he has trouble with component skills, including operations with real numbers, fractions,
decimals, and integers.
We also had another assessment of a test of mathematical aptitude too. We call it the TOMA. In
December, he earned a grade equivalent of 6/7. And look, we did an error analysis. His errors are with
exponents, unlike fractions, decimals, percents, and solving for variables. All of his assessment data is
consistent with observations by the algebra teacher. See how we wove it together? His need is accuracy
of fluency with real numbers and expression, including integers, fractions, decimals, and percent in
order to succeed in algebra I and subsequent classes. Now in this case, we used the standard, but we
only used part of the standard. So if you’re writing this goal, that’s all you need to use. There’s the tools
you’ll use.
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One more example. Selena is in tenth grade, and this is an example of a goal that is not an
academic goal, but supports her academic goal. She has a specific learning disability in reading. She
wants to go to college. She’d like to become a teacher or psychologist. She has a measurable annual goal
for reading comprehension. And just quickly, she’s included with co-‐teaching. Her ForeSight and Study
Island data, along with teacher input, indicates that she struggles with expository text. She does become
confused with multiple step directions, especially within writing. She may need to have directions
clarified, extra time to complete a test or assignment, or have tests read orally. So these are some of the
accommodations that she might need.
But in college, she’s going to have to disclose her disability. She’s going to have to request
support. But right now in tenth grade, she’s apprehensive about asking for assistance only from the
learning support teacher. So she’s relying on teachers to provide accommodations. She’s only requested
accommodations twice in a whole semester. So her need is to develop skills and habits that allow her to
disclose her disability, tell instructors and professors what she needs, find effective ways to seek help.
And we’ve made the connection with the career, education, and work standards because these attitudes
and work habits will support her in her post-‐secondary goals. And there are the tools to work on that
goal.
So what I will do is we will, even if the webinar goes longer, we will show you the examples that
we completed. But we’re going to give you a few minutes at least to play around with this. If I had to
give a suggestion to prioritize, I would say work on this table first because that will help you. I want you
to think about what you really want the students to do. By the way, at the back of the handout that you
downloaded are larger sheets for you to write on if you would prefer to use those.
We’re going to give you until 11:30. We know that’s not sufficient time, but it will get you
started. We’re going to give you about another 45 seconds and then we’re going to ask you to come
back. We have a number of questions to answer. Okay, we’re back. And Michael is going to begin with
some of the questions that have come in.
COMPUTER: Welcome to GoToWebinar, web events made easy.
MICHAEL STOEHR: One of the questions that has come in is -‐-‐ hang on one second. Sorry, I’m back.
Okay. All right, sorry about that. One of the questions that came in was looking at how to show this
alignment for the process from present ed levels to -‐-‐ through the grid to the goals. So I’m going to go
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ahead and just pull up an example that we use in our trainings so you all can see that. So just give me
one second and let’s look at that piece.
So this is an example for a student that we have used before in training called Philip. And
basically what we are looking at, you have the present ed levels listed. In this particular example, one of
the things that he needs is to work on proofreading skills because he has difficulty in writing three or
four sentences that are correctly proofread. And he is looking at having a job where it’s part of the job
he’s going to be having to write estimates up for folks. So when we look at prioritizing his needs, and
this would be in the needs section, one of the areas that he needs to work on is improving written
language by using a consistent strategy for proofreading and self-‐correcting errors.
So when we look in his grid, and this is actually the question that came up several times today,
where would you reference the measurable annual goals in the grid? And somebody else asked kind of
what does this IEP section three look like? So this is an example of that. So basically you have the post-‐
secondary goal at the top. Then you have the courses of study that he’s involved with.
And then where we referenced this particular IEP goal is in the body of the grid under the
services and activities. And again, we’re considering this measurable annual IEP goal a service. So it’s
stated here, to continue to improve writing and editing skills using self-‐monitoring strategy. It’s
referenced there. And then we have two activities listed for this particular student in this example. We
have the activity of using a digital format and then he’s going to look at developing a list of questions.
And both of those are activities and they do not have measurable annual goals connected with them.
And then that would lead to this measurable annual goal example for Philip, which is utilizing a
graphic organizing strategy to help him in his writing area. And then we would monitor the progress for
that particular goal area. So that’s just an example of what that would look like.
Okay, we have some other questions that have come in, okay, including this question about
regular education students. And I’m sorry, students that are involved in the regular education
programming and they have general education teachers working with them. And I guess the question is
really getting at is there an expectation for general education teachers to monitor progress for
students?
And I think that really what we -‐-‐ the answer to that is not really a cut and dry, simple answer. It
really depends on your high school and the systematic processes that are in place with your special
education and general education staffs. When we work with school districts in some places, it is a very
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fluid process in which the students IEPs are shared. Both the general education teacher and the special
education teacher are monitoring progress for a particular student. However, it does take time to set
that up. There has to be consideration and training done between both the special education and
general education staff. But I guess the question’s getting at can it be done? Yes, and it is happening in
certain places across the commonwealth.
Okay, another question that came in was regarding, you know, is there a rule of thumb or best
practice regarding the number of measurable goals that an IEP should have? And really for that question
it depends on that particular student and the number of goals that they need to have addressed to meet
their needs for an IEP year. I will say, though, I know in writing IEPs in the past and if we go back even
ten years, oftentimes we were writing 40, 50 goals for some students. And that really is an excessive
amount of goals.
You know, we really need to look at specific skills that the student needs to work on. We need
to hone in on those skills and be able to monitor progress on those goals over the course of the IEP year.
And if you have even 15 goals, it’s going to be very difficult to do that. So it’s really -‐-‐ it’s looking at the
needs and, as Rosemary was saying, prioritizing those needs to be as specific as possible.
Another question came in regarding what is the purpose of a short-‐term objective, and is it
required? And short-‐term objectives are only required for students that are taking the PSSA. I’m sorry,
the PASA, the PASA, the PASA. And however, they are -‐-‐ you know, I think for some teachers, they feel
that it’s a good idea to utilize short-‐term objectives. But again, they’re only required for students taking
the alternative assessment. The purpose of them really is to kind of define or break down the tasks that
are necessary in order to complete that annual goal for a student.
There were several questions that came in regarding SDIs and are those required as far as
addressing a need? And can you address needs as specially designed instruction? And yes, you can. So
when you look at the needs of a student, they can either be addressed as measurable annual goals or
specially designed instruction. They can be addressed in either way.
We had some questions that came in regarding private schools. And one of the questions was
concerning training currently occurring with approved private schools around the areas of secondary
transition and of goal writing. And the answer to that is yes, we have incorporated approved private
schools as part of the Indicator 13 training protocol over the last several years. So if your school hasn’t
been involved in the training, they will or should be included in the training in the next upcoming years.
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Okay, another question that came in was dealing with this -‐-‐ students that are taking the
alternative assessment and kids that have complex needs, and how this whole discussion today about
standards alignment applies to those students. And really we are looking at for all students. And
Rosemary stated this at the beginning of the day’s webinar. All students we should be looking at
referencing the standards and developing their measurable annual goals. We should also be looking at
academic areas for all students, even if it’s really at a very, you know, basic level, meeting that student
where they are in their skill development. However, we should still be referencing those standard areas.
Rosemary, I know you have some other questions that you had.
ROSEMARY NILLES: Yes, there was a question regarding the comprehensive diagnostic tools and where
to get that, or at least where to find out about it. And we would suggest that you go back to the
standards aligned system web portal, and that’s on an earlier slide, and click the tab for Fair
Assessments. And it has actually its own tab for information about the comprehensive diagnostic tool.
Okay. Many of the questions that came in I hope I answered by showing you a number of
different kinds of assessments. Another question is, what is the difference between indicating a grade
level percentage versus the percent the student achieves a goal? And that’s a very big difference. A
grade level percentage is a combination most frequently of classwork, homework, tests, might even
involve class participation, whereas the percent of time that a student achieves a particular skill-‐specific
goal is very specific. And this is a good time to say that not every goal is measured by percent. It may be
happening three times per week or a score of such and such on a rubric. It may be three out of -‐-‐ it may
be three consecutive assessments. So a percentage is frequently used, but it’s not the only way to
monitor how well a student is doing towards a goal.
I believe Michael has answered the question about how do you have time to do progress
monitoring. And when we do our Indicator 13 trainings in the district, we often do find that there are
systemic issues that make it difficult for special education teachers to get into the general ed
classrooms. And that’s why our most successful schools do have partnerships with general ed and
special education teachers, clear delineation of responsibilities, but we try to find easy ways to monitor
progress.
There was a question about Kevin’s non-‐example goal and how could it be changed to correct.
Well, we don’t have present levels, and that was part of the problem with that goal. There were the
present levels that accompanied that goal gave no information whatsoever about how Kevin was doing
in these areas. And so we, at this point, couldn’t even begin to tell you how to fix it because we don’t
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have baseline. But if we did have baseline and if that baseline included a number of skill areas, we would
prioritize. And we may select more than one. We’re not saying you can only have one goal for reading.
But it could be separated out into a couple of different areas if needed.
Another question about the AIMS algebra assessments. Those are standardized and these are
not something develop by the schools. There are norms to go with them. As far as where to get them, I
know our PaTTAN staff has done training. I know the IU staff have done training. And I believe on our
PaTTAN website, if you look under Math, you will at least get information about how to access them.
They’re easy to use and very helpful.
Which also the -‐-‐ someone else asked a question about Caroline’s goal. Only two areas, solving
equations and inequalities are monitored. So how is the progress tool arranged so that you can assess
just these two skills? There may be other skills assessed on the AIMS Foundations probe, but they’re
going to get so close to these critical skills that we feel in this case that it is a sufficient progress
monitoring tool to get at those skills. And it will be monitoring other essential skills as well.
There was another question about any of the assessments used as examples, require permission
to reevaluate. They certainly could be done within the context of a reevaluation. And I hesitate to say
that they would or would not because it would depend on have you used tools such as this in the past?
But CDTs, ForeSight, PSSA, ongoing progress monitoring, these are things that we would expect to see in
IEPs whether or not a diagnostic assessment such as Woodcock Reading Mastery would require a
permission to evaluate. It would depend on whether you’ve been using that on a regular basis, so that
would be a question for your administrator or your solicitor.
MICHAEL STOEHR: We also had a question about should the present education levels appear in the goal
itself as well as in the present ed levels section of the IEP? And it really isn’t necessary to have that
information specifically stated in the goal. And sometimes, to be honest, that becomes very confusing
when you state the information in the goal. You really should be able to go back and find that baseline
data in the present ed levels. it’s stated as a need and then you write your goal based on what is that
student going to be working on over the course of this IEP year.
Another comment came in and it was just in reference to utilizing the career, education, and
work standards. And I guess should just reemphasize that using the career, education, and work
standards is an important component as we’re working with students in transition in referencing those
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standards and developing goals for students that are kind of outside of the traditional reading, writing,
math areas. So it really is important just to kind of reiterate that.
We had another question that came in, and sorry if the response was confusing regarding
students’ needs, but really those students’ needs an be addressed either as specially designed
instruction or as a measurable annual goal. As you’re writing those, you can reference them in both of
those ways in the IEP. However, when this came in, you do need to have at least one measurable annual
goal in an IEP. I mean, sometimes we see IEPs and they do not list any measurable annual goals. And
really how else are you addressing those needs for that kid and what are you monitoring for progress for
that student?
ROSEMARY NILLES: Right, and I would add it is correct that things listed in needs can be addressed via
measurable annual goals, especially designed instruction related services, and sometimes even goals or
activities in the grid. But when we’re listing a specific skill deficit in the list of needs, that was the basis
for my comment that when we’re listing a specific skill deficit, that does need a measurable annual goal.
MICHAEL STOEHR: To answer a number of questions, the presentation that we presented today, the
webinar slides for the PowerPoint as well as the examples, are posted on the PaTTAN website. And the
examples, and we’ll be looking at those in a minute, of how we looked at those three case studies as far
as the assignment that you were doing, the you do piece, will also be posted. Rosemary is going to be
going over those in a minute.
ROSEMARY NILLES: Another goal about AIMSweb, on the AIMSweb site they do provide goals. Is using
the goal provided by AIMSweb sufficient? And I haven’t looked at those recently, but I would say do
they align to Pennsylvania academic standards? Simply writing a goal to oral reading fluency is not what
we’re recommending. I know we’ve done that in the past and we’ve actually in years past in our
progress monitoring trainings taught how to write a goal to oral reading fluency. But we’d really like to
be a little broader and list the specific skills that the student needs to do. And then in that case, oral
reading fluency might be an indicator of overall progress in decoding or even comprehension.
MICHAEL STOEHR: With CDTs and their location and where to find them and what the CDT stands for, it
is classroom diagnostic tool. And I believe Rosemary did mention this. They can be found on that SAS or
the standards aligned system portal. And it actually has a tab for that. So that, just to kind of reiterate
what that is and where you can find it. Okay. Rosemary, if you want to, I’m going to go ahead and move
this. And if you want to show the examples -‐-‐
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ROSEMARY NILLES: I just have a couple more questions. Three out of five consecutive probes. The
person who asked that question is exactly right. Once a student did the skill three times in a row, they
have mastered this skill. Brad’s IEP goal, a couple of comments around this. The standard doesn’t match
the wording to Brad’s goal. Remember, it doesn’t necessarily have to be an exact match. We looked at
examples -‐-‐ or we looked at the standards as a basis. Another comment about Brad’s goal was too
complicated. It is complicated. And you might have written that goal in a different way. That’s one way
of doing it, and that’s why we made the point there’s no right or wrong way. So perhaps another person
found a simpler way to monitor progress towards improving that vocabulary, and that would be great as
long as it meets all the requirements of a goal and has an end point.
MICHAEL STOEHR: A question came in as far as where to find the career, education, and work
standards. And you can find those on the career and technical education website. If you go to that
particular site, those are listed. And they actually have a number of resources, so they go along with
those career, ed, and work standards. Again, they’re found at the career education, career tech ed site
for Pennsylvania.
ROSEMARY NILLES: Well, you can find them there and that’s a fabulous set of resources on that
website. However, you can also get them right on our SAS portal. Click the Standards and you can find
them by clicking Standards, or you can also download them as a PDF document. And we just -‐-‐ we really
like the career, educational, work standards because they give so many ideas for the self-‐determination
and organization and actual movement towards post-‐school outcomes.
MICHAEL STOEHR: Okay. And again, because a couple more folks just typed [inaudible]. The examples
for the your turn section, we are going to go over those in a minute. But those are also going to be
posted to the PaTTAN website. It may just take a few minutes to be posted. One of the support people
are putting those up now.
ROSEMARY NILLES: Yeah, they may already be there, in fact.
MICHAEL STOEHR: Okay. All right, so let’s go ahead. I’m going to move this down and let me go over to
the other computer. And Rosemary, if you want to talk about the examples.
ROSEMARY NILLES: Okay, so quickly I’m going to give you some completed examples. William’s goal for
writing: given biweekly writing prompts in English class and use of a spell checker of his choice. William
will use correct grammar, spelling, and sentence formation as evidenced by writing and editing a three
paragraph essay and scoring at least ten out of 12 points on a conventions rubric on five out of six final
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products. So that’s telling how often, how well, how consistently, and what exactly the behavior is, as
well as the specially designed instruction. William will record his goal on a graph. Teacher will also
maintain a graph.
And then certainly the teachers would be reviewing other random writing assignments across
the curriculum, okay? So we would be looking for that skill to be generalized. That’s one way to write
the example, and perhaps some of you had other ways. And maybe they were better ways, and that’s
fine as long as your goals include the parts and are meaningful an able to be progress monitored.
Okay, Jason’s algebra. This was the one that we only used part of the standard given weekly
mixed skills probes. He’ll solve linear equations and inequalities with real numbers and expressions,
including integers, fractions, decimals, and percents, scoring at least eight out of ten correct on five
consecutive assessments. Notice in this one we didn’t use a percent. We said eight out of ten correct.
There will be ten -‐item questions. We could have used a percent. There is the reference to the
standard, but notice on this one we put some goal-‐specific SDA, SDI, specially designed instruction. He’s
going to practice on problems with real numbers and expressions, including integers, fractions,
decimals, and percents. His probes will be graphed. His scores will be graphed, reported every nine
weeks. Teachers will also be looking at those items on ForeSight, classroom formative assessments and
CDT as well.
Lastly, Selina. What we said we wanted Selina to do was to start asking for help by herself. And
when you download the completed examples. We’ll see how we completed the little grid that helps us
to select a skill or to develop the goal. Given classroom assignments or assessments, Selina will
independently approach the instructor to request assistance or clarification at least one time per week
for four out of five weeks. And we even listed the baseline as approximately two times per semester
with prompting. That’s not necessary to list that baseline, just kind of gave us a reminder of how seldom
she was doing it.
Is this realistic? Perhaps we want to say -‐-‐ we want her to do this at least once every other week
or at least once a month. It depends on the student, their classes, and what the IEP team decides. How
would Selina measure that? We like to put the onus back on the student, logging the contacts in her
assignment book, reviewing once a week with her case manager. So maybe there would be a week
where she didn’t have that opportunity. So you might have chosen to write that goal differently.
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Here’s what we want you to think about. How’d you do? Were you happy with what you did? I
realize you may not have had enough time. Did you feel it was something you’d like to share? Better
than what we offered? It includes most of the IEP’s criteria? Well, maybe it wasn’t measurable enough
or vague, but hopefully you learned today what to do to improve it. Or maybe you are feeling like you
still need assistance. And that’s fine. Learning to write measurable annual goals is not something that
happens in a two-‐hour period, so we urge you to work with your supervisor, your colleagues if you have
colleagues who are skilled and confident, as well as your IU tac. Certainly in your Indicator 13 trainings,
those of you who are being trained or who have been trained, you have IU and PaTTAN consultants that
you can connect with.
We just want to emphasize again that all the pieces must fit together: the present levels, the
assessment data, what you write in your list of needs, how you reference your measurable annual goals
in the grid, and how you go on to write the measurable annual goal. It has to make sense. And it needs
to really help that student move along towards his or her post-‐secondary goal. So we want you to think
of the IEP as a single unit. IEP goals do not stand alone.
We hope that this has been informative for you. we thank you for your participation and for
your wonderful questions. We have Michael’s and my contact information on the very last slide. You
may certainly contact us if you have additional questions. We thank you again and we wish you all a
good day, and we thank you for your work on behalf of kids.