Collaborating with Special Education Teachers: Using Goals to Grow Our Readers

Heather Zimmerman contributed today's thinking.

This year my school district is having 6-12 special education teachers use the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment kit to determine reading levels and to use Fountas and Pinnell’s The Continuum of Learning to guide reading goals for IEPs.  

As the literacy coach I worked with the teachers in my building last year to make sure they knew how to use the assessment kit.  This year we started to test in fall.  I am so excited we are collaborating and focusing on literacy together.  I really want to make sure that my teachers get the most out of the data as possible to find it useful.  

After teachers tested and wrote goals, my principal and I met with the special education teachers and our PST (program support teacher) to discuss the goals.  I led a discussion focusing on what the assessment can tells us, reflecting on the goals picked from The Continuum of Learning, and tools to use while conferring with readers.  I told my special education teachers that they are the experts in writing goals, and I am just here with my reading lens to help them if needed.    

The Continuum of Learning was a new book for my teachers, so I wanted to make sure they felt comfortable with their goals.  As we reflected, we talked about the goals meeting the following guidelines:

• A goal other teachers will understand. (The goal does not need to be copied word for word from the book.)
• A goal that can be measured.
• A goal that is generalizable.  (That way the goal can be applied to all classes.)

From there we reflected on the goals using the above guidelines.  This chart I created helped guide our thinking:

After we reflected on the goals, I shared some conferring questions and tools to track conferring both for special education teachers and regular education teachers.  I appreciated our time together and the new learning I experienced as I found out more about the IEP process and goal requirements.  I look forward to learning and growing together this year as we continue on this journey.