During my first year of teaching, I had 7 Annuals and one triennial IEP. Writing IEP’s includes updating progress on goals, progress in classrooms, compiling data, writing new goals for the years, writing reports from assessments, and considering testing options and accommodations for your students. It is time consuming and necessary process in special education. Initially, I had approached the goal writing as a general theme: What do I want this child to be able to accomplish in their life? And then narrow down the focus from there, however I did not realize until this year in my ‘high parent and advocate involvement setting’, that some of the goals I was writing were unrealistic and unachievable, and how big of a deal that really was.
Let’s get one thing clear, I was never setting anyone up to fail here. Maybe I being too optimistic.  Let’s give an example. If my high school student was unable to prepare any time of meal for themselves without prompting, my goal would read something like: “AZ will be able to prepare a 4-6 step snack or meal with 0-2 gestural prompts with 80% accuracy on 4/5 trials.” Basically I want AZ to be able to make a snack for himself. This will improve overall quality of life and greatly help the family or caregivers of the student. I promise my intentions were good ones!   I actually took issue with goals that clarified that “JK will learn 80 new vocabulary words about the science topic in class and use them in this or that way in writing and in conversation on 4/5 days” etc etc. Way too specific!?  What happens when they meet that goal? That doesn’t represent a broader view of what we are working on in my classroom! My class is way more than memorizing vocab words!

Working with lower income and many less involved parents last year, the IEP goals were generally unanimously approved and those goals became our overall focus for the years academic and functional work.  If the student did not meet the goal, but made progress, this was counted as a victory, and we either continued the goal or made new ones depending on where we wanted the student to focus their efforts.  Maybe they did not meet the goal, but we were going to keep working on it!

This year however, I am dealing with a new demographic of students and parents, often involving a ‘child right’s advocate’.  And many of these advocates, lawyers, and legally inclined parents base the success and failure of their students by the number of goals that he or she meets.

Until this year, I had not heard of goals not being met being used as a device in lawsuits against schools. Of course, not meeting all your goals can show a parent and administration that something is not going well in the classroom, but in general I had thought of meeting 8/12 goals as being a relatively successful year, especially when we are discussing students with special needs. Unfortunately, I was wrong.  A recent IEP had me re-writing almost every single one of my carefully written goals to add for specificity.  A mix of advocate pressure on unmet goals from the last year and recommendations from parent team to increase an already high amount of service due to the 5 unmet goals led the team to specify to me that these goals need to be specific and more importantly, achievable.

I really wanted this child to be able to ask his peers questions in class instead of asking an aide or sitting there bored. Its a good target, but it wasn’t very specific, how could he show us this consistently, how would he know what to do, how would we teach him this skill?
We wanted this child to be able to answer comprehension questions on grade level text verbally. What types of questions, how many questions, what grade level is appropriate?

But the most important question that I had never really considered thoroughly was: Could we ACTUALLY SEE them doing this in one academic year? Sure, it would be amazing if Johnny could cook a meal with no prompting. We would all LOVE to see that. We all want to work on that! But could a nonverbal 16 year old with no cooking ability ACTUALLY do this in one short year?? The answer is, probably not.

We all want our students to achieve amazing things. We want them to do what their grade level peers can do. We want to write goals that represent what we will be doing all day in class. We want to help them improve their quality of life. But we need to write goals that represent what our children can achieve realistically so that we can show that progress significantly each year.