What is person-centered transition planning?
Page 2: Self-Determination
Person-centered transition planning encourages students to take the lead in preparing for their future. It is an ideal context for students to strengthen and apply their self-determination—the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that empower a person to set goals for themselves, make decisions about their own life, and advocate for their own needs. For students with disabilities, self-determination includes:
- Understanding their disability and how it impacts them
- Knowing which supports help eliminate or minimize barriers they might encounter
- Having the ability to self-advocate for those supports
Although self-determination is a broad concept, the nine elements presented in the table below comprise the essential skills, abilities, and beliefs necessary for increasing students’ self-determination.
| Element | Definition |
| Choice making | The skill of selecting a path forward between two known options. |
| Decision-making | The skill of selecting a path forward based on various solutions that have each been thoughtfully considered. |
| Problem-solving | The skill of finding solutions to difficult or complex issues. |
| Goal setting and attainment | The ability to develop a goal, plan for implementation, and measure success. |
| Self-regulation | The ability to monitor and control one’s own behaviors, actions, and skills in various situations. |
| Self-advocacy | The skills necessary to speak up or defend a cause or a person. |
| Internal locus of control | The belief that one has control over the outcomes that are important to their own life. |
| Self-efficacy | Belief in one’s own ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish specific tasks. |
| Self-awareness | Basic understanding of one’s own strengths, needs, and abilities. |
Source: Adapted from I’m Determined (2019).
When students are encouraged to make choices and take ownership of their educational and transition plans, they increase their agency, a crucial part of self-determination and long-term success. Students who develop self-determination skills and exercise them through the transition planning process are:
agency
glossary
- More likely to stay in school
- Better prepared to set goals and achieve them
- More actively involved in decision-making about their lives
- More likely to experience positive post-school outcomes
Research Shows
- A meta-analysis identified self-determination as a predictor of better outcomes for young adults with disabilities in the areas of postsecondary education, employment, and independent living.
(Mazzotti et al., 2021)
In the interview below, Erik Carter discusses how transition planning can enhance students’ self-determination skills. Then, Karen Gross describes how students might exercise their self-determination to pursue a career in an area of interest.
Erik Carter, PhD
Executive Director, Baylor Center
for Disability and Flourishing
Baylor University
(time: 1:46)
Transcript: Erik Carter, PhD
Every young person in our schools should be equipped to make important decisions about their future education, about their future careers, about their future lifestyles. And that’s just an important part of growing up and becoming more self-determined and assuming adult roles.
Students have chances to make decisions about their future career path or their pursuit of college or not. They have to problem solve a host of issues that can arise, such as a desired class or opportunity that is just not available or even disagreement with someone else about what’s the best decision for you. They learn to set short-term goals for their upcoming semester or school year, as well as identify when those goals have been met. And they have to learn to advocate for their support needs or for their own perspectives when someone else sees things a little bit differently.
It’s also important that students with disabilities have that chance to learn how to set their own goals and to identify paths towards reaching their goals and identifying the supports and services and relationships that they’ll need along the way. They have to self-manage or keep track of their own progress towards their goals. And all of that’s enhanced by having knowledge about their own strengths and their needs and their interests and their preferences.
Self-determination gets defined and described in a whole variety of ways, but put simply, it means having the capacity to steer one’s own life in ways and directions that ultimately improve your own quality of life. That capacity gets enhanced when students have the knowledge and skills across different areas: the ability to make choices, decision-making skills, problem-solving skills, goal-setting skills, self-advocacy, self-management, and self-awareness. And so as you hear those different skills, you can really see how the process of transition planning can really help you learn about these aspects of self-determination and to put them in practice.
Transcript: Karen Gross, EdD
Self-determination plays an extremely high role in a student’s success during school and after they graduate high school. We know that self-determination is a predictor for success for postsecondary outcomes. It’s extremely exciting to be able to empower students to be able to start taking more of a role in their lives and education. The student knows best what they want to do and what they want their outcomes to be. So it’s not really for us to decide that, because if we did, we will probably get it wrong 99% of the time. If we listen to what the student is saying to us, then I think it gives us the tools to be able to assist them. And I think with self-determination, students learn about themselves. They actually start asking questions or start talking to us, and then we might have answers or ideas that can assist them. So for example, when I work with students, they know what their parents do, or maybe their aunt and uncle does, for a living. But they might not know of the endless possibilities that are in the world. I think that it’s really exciting to talk to them because then you start having different ideas with them about different options that they can have. So when you take a career option, let’s say the medical field, you can have students that want to be doctors and go to medical school. You can have students that want to possibly go into nursing. They could end up being a nurse practitioner with a master’s degree. They can get their bachelor’s in nursing. They can go for two years and get an RN as a registered nurse. They can go to a tech program and become a CNA, a Certified Nursing Assistant. They can also be a student that might not have that skill set. And they can actually work as a companion for an individual where you might not need your high school diploma, but you might be able to learn those on-the-job training skills. And those are all different things that you can work on with students if they are expressing to you what they want and then are gaining those skills and understanding who they are and having that self-confidence and independence to be able to do that after they graduate high school. If we can work with students to help them identify what their interests are and to help them get those skill sets, they are ahead of the game before they leave high school. And I think that that’s important. And I think that all plays in with self-determination.
Did You Know?
Taking risks and making mistakes are essential to self-determination. Students need opportunities to make their own choices, even with the possibility of failure. Experiencing and learning from setbacks helps students develop the problem-solving and decision-making skills that will enable them to take charge of their own lives.
