Now you have a student with an IEP, and new goals have just been decided on at their recent IEP meeting. It is time to implement these goals into classroom instruction! The scope of this process will look different for every student and their educational programming, but here are some ideas on how to create classroom instruction that is inclusive and engaging for all students.
Reading
If your student has a specific goal in the area of reading, a service provider will likely push in or pull out to provide those services. However, you can support both their reading goal(s) and more general reading education in a number of other ways. Take a look at their reading goal(s) and see how they might relate to what you are already working on with the rest of your class. Reading goals often fall into the categories of reading fluency, phonics and phonological awareness, and comprehension. These are the same things you will see in most reading curriculums as well, and many parallels can be drawn. If your student has a reading fluency goal, how can you include them in a reading group during small group or center rotations? Consider partnering them with a student they could practice reading back and forth with. If your student has a phonics or phonological awareness goal, how can you help them identify those same skills they are working on in other areas of the school day? Consider highlighting a specific part of speech in all of their handouts for the day, or having them hunt for a specific blend or phoneme through everything they read that day. If your student has a reading comprehension goal, how can you build in opportunities for them to practice reading comprehension beyond your reading block? Consider incorporating comprehension questions during math word problems, group instruction, and following group directions. This is beneficial for all students, too! When working on your classroom reading curriculum, consider how you can make the work students are doing accessible. See if your curriculum offers leveled passages, or use a website such as NewsELA or Reading A-Z to find same-topic passages at different fluency and comprehension levels for different students. If students are doing an assignment, consider reducing the number of questions or number of sentences to be produced so that the work is expected to take a similar length of time for all students.
Writing
If your student has a specific goal in the area of writing, a service provider will likely push in or pull out to provide those services. However, you can support both their writing goal(s) and more general writing education in a number of other ways. Take a look at their writing goal(s) and see how they might relate to what you are already working on with the rest of your class. Writing goals often fall into the categories of fine motor written work and written expression. If they are working on fine motor skills, consider both how you can build in opportunities for practice (things like cutting and gluing, lacing, tracing, and more are examples), and how you can accommodate other forms of written expression. They might have written expression skills that are better suited for typing or speech-to-text so that they still get the opportunity to participate in class activities without the fine motor written work component. If they have a written expression goal, consider how you can build in opportunities for them to verbally answer different types of questions throughout the school day. For example, ask them to explain something they did in an elective class, ask them to give an opinion on a topic or preference, or ask them to retell something they did the previous day. All of these questions will build on their written expression skills to transfer into dedicated writing time.
Math
If your student has a specific goal in the area of math, a service provider will likely push in or pull out to provide those services. However, you can support both their math goal(s) and more general math education in a number of other ways. Take a look at their math goal(s) and see how they might relate to what you are already working on with the rest of your class. Math goals often fall into the categories of math computation and math application skills. If a student has a math computation goal, try to offer them additional time during their school day to practice example problems of the operation they are working on. It can also be very simple to trade out work that your class might be doing in fractions, for example, with multiplication work if that is the specific math goal the student is working on at the time. If a student has a math application goal, consider how you can incorporate this math work into your reading comprehension. Can you create word problems for them based on your reading passage or social studies from that day? Making these interdisciplinary connections can help students to better understand math application concepts as well. As much as possible, avoid singling out students who might be working on alternate skills during your math block. A great way to support this is to include small group instruction time and independent work time where all students can have opportunities to practice academic independence. There are a number of wonderful online resources where you can find both interactive math lessons and games, such as iReady, Zearn, BrainPop, and Gimkit, and printable work for all grade levels and types of math practice to eliminate creating extra work for you, such as K-5 Learning, Math HELP, EasyCBM, Common Core Sheets, and Math-Aids.
Science / Social Studies
Subjects such as science and social studies can be easier to adapt for different students than core subjects like reading and math, but they certainly come with their own challenges. The primary challenge to offering inclusive science or social studies instruction to a group of diverse learners is that these subjects often require reading that can be difficult to adapt. One way to work around this could be to have students read independently and offer them the choice of also turning on text-to-speech and listening instead. You could also put students in small groups to read, and have them work together to decipher words they are unfamiliar with. For projects or experiments, consider offering visual or auditory instructions, or providing students with instructions in advance so that they can look at it with you or with a caregiver at home so that they don’t need to read and understand complex instructions in the moment, which can be stressful. Consider also reducing the number of problems required to allow for the time work will take students to complete, and allow students to share what they have learned in alternative ways to writing a report or paper. For example, they could create a presentation, share what they have learned visually, or record a voice memo for you instead.
Do you have another great way that you have implemented IEP goals into the general education classroom? Share with fellow educators by leaving a comment below!