What can school personnel do to help students in the transition planning process?

Transcript: Jim Martin, PhD

It begins with quality transition assessment. The special education laws tell us that we have to use transition assessments to help students develop their transition goals. There’s no shortage of transition assessments. We just have to find transition assessments that match students’ skills and abilities so that it yields useful information so students and families and educators can get together and use that to define what their goals are. We need to have students answer two basic sets of questions. The first set of questions focus on their post school goals. Where do students want to live, learn, and work when they’re out of high school? Answers those questions then provide the post-secondary goals. To answer those questions, students use the results of their transition assessments, conversation with parents, friends, educators to come up with tentative answers to those questions, realizing that they’re going to change probably year after year after year as students learn more about themselves, what their strengths are, what their needs are, what various jobs are out there in the world, the extent that they want to study a particular area after high school. All of those answers influences their responses to those questions, where do I want to learn, where do I want to live, where do I want to work when I’m out of high school. I think what’s probably more important than the answer to the post-secondary goals because those many cases are way off into the future, but they kind of set the direction for where the boat is going. What I think is almost more important are the answers to a different set of questions. What do I have to learn now to live where I want when I’m out of high school? What do I have to learn now to work where I want when I’m out of high school? And what do I have to learn now to know what I want to do when I’m out of high school? The answer to those questions provides students with the annual transition goals. And those accumulate over the school years and help students get closer to what their post-secondary goals are. It’s the answers to those more short-term questions that will build the annual transition goals that will provide students the information to help refine their post-secondary goals.

Transcript: David W. Test, PhD

Self-determination is really a global component that includes many different teachable skills. For instance, decision-making, problem-solving, goal-setting, and self-advocacy. Self-determination in general means helping students organize and lead their own lives. Self-advocacy is a piece of that where a student speaks up for themselves. In terms of the transition planning process, self-advocacy is often demonstrated during the IEP process where students are helping to decide what gets in their IEPs. And the first thing that drives the entire process should be what does the student want to do in terms of their post school outcomes, in terms of education, employment, and if necessary independent living. So a teacher and a student will identify those pieces, and then often students attend the IEP meeting where they may be taught to lead the IEP meeting or at least contribute in terms of letting the IEP team know what their strengths and weaknesses are and what their post school goals are.

Transcript: Jim Martin, PhD

Students with disabilities who are more self-determined do better in school and do better when they’re out of school, have better post-school outcomes, and some evidence suggests that students with better self-determination skills also do better academically when they’re in school. It’s a set of skills that we have to teach, and we teach it through providing opportunities for students to become more self-determined. Now, what self-determination actually is, that’s an interesting topic in and of itself because there’s numerous self-determination definitions. On one hand, some people believe self-determination [is] any student-directed behavior that impacts the quality of their life. To me, that’s almost too broad. I’m a strong believer that self-determination needs to focus on teaching students essential self-regulatory behaviors that they need to obtain the goals in their lives. It includes setting goals, developing plans to obtain their goals, and then using the different self-management strategies to actually make goal-attainment possible. Self-advocacy, it’s a subset of self-determination. Self-advocacy is when students will speak up for themselves. For instance, they will go to their tenth-grade algebra teacher and ask that different accommodations be provided based on what’s in their IEP. So students will know their strengths, they’ll know their limitations, they’ll know their supports, they’ll know their accommodations and ask for those at the right time, and then use their supports.

Transcript: Self-determination Skills

Speaker: Self-determination skills. How does that help the transition process?

Brianna: Well, it definitely helps with that whole independent…I think when my students first came in and it was…well, they were ninth graders, so four years before they were transitioning out of high school, they were definitely in the mindset that they were just waiting for people to tell them what they were going to do, and what they needed to do, where they should go, that sort of thing. So, now that they have self-determination skills, you can see that really enhancing their plans for future and how they now have the ability to do the research that it takes to figure out, you know, they say, “Okay, this is my goal. Now I know what steps to plan out, you know, I know how to reach that goal or at least how to do, find the resources that will help me to reach the goal.” And it’s more intrinsic. It’s more internal locus of control. Rather than waiting for someone to say, “Okay, now you need to go do this. Now do this,” they take control and lead the way.

Transcript: Paula Kohler, PhD

One’s level of self-determination is not something that’s going to happen in one year, in one class, like learning how to divide fractions, but we need to develop it across time, and we need to provide opportunities for students to apply their self-determination. Part of that is developing your self-awareness, your self-concept. You can start integrating things that build students’ self-determination, assignments that help kids understand their interest, skills, and limits. If you’re teaching writing or if you’re teaching reading or you’re teaching technology, you can focus your assignments to allow students to learn these things about themselves, while at the same time you’re focusing on the skill of writing, the understanding of reading, and then the use of technology. You can integrate math into this so that they’re starting to learn to graph then they can start graphing their own performance either in courses or around some concept that they’re investigating. People need to have certain characteristics that we develop in our kids, things like self-efficacy, the belief that what I do will influence the outcome, motivation, self-awareness. We then focused on knowledge, so the knowledge that people need to have to be self-determined that might be understanding my disability, it might be knowing the accommodations that I need in certain settings, might be knowledge of my rights and my responsibilities, and then the skills that we could teach students. So we can teach decision-making, we can teach goal-setting, we can teach self-advocacy.

Transcript: Jim Martin, PhD

Fortunately, so much of what can be done for especially transition education and teaching basic self-determination skills can be taught within a general education framework. Whether it’s a writing assignment or a homework assignment, all of those are quite amenable to teaching goal-attainment or very basic self-determination or transition-education concepts. And it’s a fairly simple process once we break down what the essential skills are that we want students to know. Then we need to just find opportunities to teach those skills. We know, for instance, that there’s academic skills that are important for success, but equally so there are non-academic skills that are important to success. And it appears that not many of those non-academic skills are really taught much in general education classes, and that’s something that we really have to focus on: teaching students to know what their strengths and limits are, for kids with disability how it impacts their persistence, that ability to keep working on a goal until you attain it. How to better interact with others, setting goals, attaining those goals, having a paid job, those are all non-academic skills that are very much associated with post-school success. On top of that, for kids with disabilities, it appears that as kids become more involved in their IEP planning, can speak up at their actual IEP meetings, and do something every week to attain their own transition goals, those components of students becoming more involved in their IEP are also really associated with better post-school outcomes. The key is, special educators working with general educators need to find the opportunity to teach those skills. And it needs to become something that’s done a teacher at a time across various content classes.