What are some ways to involve students in student-centered transition planning?

Transcript: Erik Carter, PhD

Annual IEP goals and transition goals are different in a number of ways. One is primarily their time horizon. Post-secondary goals are really those that focus on life after graduation, and they’re also outcome-focused. What is it that the student will do in the early years after leaving high school? Where will they work, where will they live, where will they go to school? They address areas like future training, future education, and future employment and future independent living, and they also are required to be based on age-appropriate transition assessments, which is a little bit different than the requirements for annual goals. Annual goals have a much shorter time horizon, and they’re really focused on what happens in the upcoming school year. They have a shorter time-focus.

If you’ve done a transition plan well, you should have annual IEP goals that link to and lead to those post-school transition goals. They’re connected in that way, that each year of progress you make on an annual goal should be moving you closer towards attaining that post-school goal or preparing for that post-school goal.

Transcript: Jim Martin, PhD

I think the biggest innovation that happened with IDEA came about with the inclusion of transition assessments. Transition assessments have really helped get transition education more focused. We have a battery of transition assessments we have to do, and one of them has to be a formal assessment, meaning that it’s a standardized assessment that has adequate psychometric properties that we know is a good assessment to help students plan for their life after high school. That sets the tone and gets the boat going in the right direction. But the engine that really drives the motor to get the boat going are the annual transition goals. And we now know that there’s a set of generalizable behaviors. They’re non-academic skills that when students learn these behaviors it increases their likelihood of post-secondary education or post-secondary employment. So as we assess students we need to focus on assessments that will look at these generalizable, non-academic behaviors, establish our strengths and needs using those assessments, and then based on the needs develop annual transition goals to ensure that we teach students those generalizable non-academic behaviors, like student involvement in their IEP meetings, disability awareness, interacting with others, knowledge of strengths or limitations. When they learn those generalizable, critical, non-academic skills, it will help them attain whatever their ultimate goals are. That’s probably the most important thing we can do in transition, is to teach kids those generalizable non-academic skills.

Transcript: Erik Carter, PhD

Transition assessments tend to be much less formal than other assessment processes throughout a student’s special education career, and they tend to include less often a battery of standardized tests. Instead, what you’re really trying to do is identify what a student’s interests and strengths and preferences and needs are. Given that focus, it’s really prudent to involve the student in that process. It’s very difficult to speak to someone’s interests and preferences if they weren’t actively involved in aspects of exploring what those interests and preferences might be and giving feedback and input into that assessment process.

There are also transition-planning tools out there that have a specific place for students in that process. One that I used widely as a transition teacher was called the Transition Planning Inventory. A variety of other tools have the same approach, but essentially there’s a version that’s completed by the teacher, there’s a version completed by parents or family members, and there’s a version of that tool that’s also completed by the students themselves. That gives the student a chance to have input on their own perspectives, on their needs and strengths in different domains around transition. It gives them a chance to sharpen their ability to really self-evaluate effectively, especially when you compare their assessment perspectives to those of teachers and parents. We would use these different approaches where we’d ask the student and the parents and my team to complete that assessment. We’d compile all that information in advance of the meeting, and we’d see places where everyone was in great agreement about strengths, and needs and areas where we had very different perspectives. Often it was the student who had overestimated their abilities or had aspirations that were a bit higher than anyone else might have had. And so that would become a context for us to talk about, “Why are there differences of opinion? Why are you seeing the student in a different way than we do?” and then preparing the student to be able to share their perspective at the upcoming meeting.

The role of school psychologists and others around assessment doesn’t change as students are involved in IEP meetings in middle school and high school, but there’s added focus on planning for life after high school. It means we have to think beyond some of the traditional assessments and bring in perspectives of different people. The student’s perspectives becomes really important in those areas. It’s not intended to replace the assessments that would already be part of the planning process but to round them out and add a different voice and different vantage point to those, as well.

Transcript: Kelly Smoak

When we are in class, we do a number of assessments, through interest inventories, inventories that we have, pencil and paper we pass out in the classroom. We may also do some assessments online. Gathering that information, we come back after it’s done the next class period and really go over it with the kids independently, maybe in a group setting with a couple of students, and they can share their information with one another, gives them an opportunity to discuss what they like with their peers or what they found out about themselves with their peers. It also allows me to walk around and engage with them and find out how they’re assessing themselves.

They have Google Docs, and we have a bank of all of their information. It has a copy of their IEP. Anything that we do that is related to building on that IEP, we have them save it in that file so they can pull that back up when it’s time for the IEP, to prepare for it. I’ll pull them aside independently, and I’ll have them pull that up and say, “Let’s go back and look at what your results were from your various assessments throughout the year. Let’s see what your interests are,” and then it’s more of an independent time, just a casual conversation with the student, and that’s when we begin to talk about how that fits into the IEP.