When it comes to IEP goals, there is no question that they must be worked on throughout the school year. But when you have a large caseload of students with multiple IEP goals, how often should you work on IEP goals for each child?
Practicing IEP Goals
Organizing how often students should be practicing IEP goals throughout the month or week can be challenging… and will often depend on the criteria within each IEP goal. Thankfully, there are some tips and tricks to make it easier.
Choose the ideas below that work best for you and your students within the time that you have available.
Practice as a Warm-Up
Before you get going on a lesson, use that early class time to do IEP goal warm-up activities. If you have students with similar goals, it is easy to create an activity that gives them practice with their goals.
This practice can be done daily, a few times per week, or once a week depending on your schedule and your students’ needs.
Here’s a blog post on how to determine which work samples to keep for data collection purposes.
Align Goals with What’s Already Being Done
If your students have reading comprehension goals, instead of creating an entirely new text to assess or practice their IEP goals, use the text that you’re already using for other lessons.
Modify it as needed, but make things easier by using the material that is already being worked on in class.
Group Students Together
When you have a lot of students on your caseload it can be challenging to figure out how to have them all practice and assess them.
Group students with like goals together and designate a day or time of day to work with that group on the specific goals. This saves you time as you don’t have to repeat the practice or lesson each time for each student. You can do this for language arts, reading, math, and most other academic goals that your students have.
Break the Goals Into Smaller Pieces
Break down the goals into smaller pieces so that you can use those teachable moments or downtime to have them quickly practice their IEP goals.
Have 5 minutes before the bell rings? Make addition practice a game or see how many sight words they can identify. Sometimes a quick game of “beat the clock” can make practicing a lot more fun for them – and for you!
Switch Off
With a large caseload of students who all have multiple goals in the IEPs, it can be a logistical nightmare to cover everything every week. Instead of stressing, alternate when you practice and assess the goals.
For example, you may practice and assess all of the language arts and reading goals in the first week. Then, during the second week, everyone is practicing and focusing on math.
Switching off between subjects each week makes it easier to manage while making sure that students are getting the practice they need for each and every IEP goal that they have.
Determining a schedule for when your students should practice each of the IEP goals can be challenging and time-consuming. Choosing a method that works well for your schedule and for your students can make all the difference.
Don’t forget to keep extra copies of your most used data sheets on hand at all times to make data collection simpler and more seamless.
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