Teacher in Autism Unit Needs Help Dealing with Parents

Meredith asks for some IEP meeting tips for dealing with her student’s parents:
“The parents of my student with severe Autism, a speech impairment, and self injurious behavior that leads to a lot of self biting insists that he’ll be going to college to become a computer programmer. I am lucky if I can get him to log in on his computer independently. His mom wants him reading at level so he can be ready and doing on-grade-level math (Freshman Algebra), but he has a hard time with anything past two digit addition and subtraction when regrouping is involved. My campus is promising all kinds of miracles I don’t think I can deliver. I’m starting to hate my job, this is just too much. What can I do?”

Oh no, Meredith! I can see how this would feel overwhelming. Thousands of teachers leave the profession every year because they feel overwhelmed. And what sucks the most is it’s often not the students, but the paperwork, the administration, and the educational system itself that runs teachers out of the classroom.

So let’s take a look at your problem and see if we can’t give you some tools to address it, some IEP meeting tips, and strategies to get you back to loving your job!

Who’s the Boss?

So it sounds like you’re having some problems with how to answer to your your student’s parents, how to answer to your campus Administration, and ultimately how to answer to your student. So let’s talk about some ways you can address the needs of a student who’s transition plan outreaches their current academic performance.

How to Answer to Parents

I always joke that I’d be the biggest pain in the butt if my child were in a severe/mod classroom, life skills, or an Autism unit. You see me pull up in the parking lot and everyone would run! The reason for that is because I would always be out advocating for what I thought was in the best interest of my kid. And honestly, that’s exactly what most of our parents are doing. They are doing exactly what we would do if we were in their shoes. Now the method may change, but the outcome is the same… to do right by our kid.

As you communicate with the parents, be sure you let them know that you are out for the best interest of their kid to and the last thing that either of you want to do is lower your bar or abandon your expectations.

Let your parents know these three things:

First, that you want what’s best for their child too. Let them know that their child is not just another kid in your classroom, and that you are always looking out for them and their best interest. But don’t just talk the talk, walk the walk Do things that show the parents that you do care. Developing relationships with parents can bridge so many divides, it’s so worth the effort.
Secondly, you want to let the parents of your students know that you are only a step in their journey and you can’t do it all. Then ask them to help you come up with a plan to meet their child where he is and move him towards his goal in a way that makes sense and is meaningful.
And that brings us to the last thing to share with parents. I would be very purposeful to let a parent know that even general education students on grade level aren’t expected to gain two or more academic years in a standard calendar year. To ask a child whose several grade levels behind to close the gap and function on grade level in a short amount of time, here he’s a freshman and has until his senior year, it’s probably an unattainable goal. Having this kind of conversation is very difficult, but you can’t be expected to make two or three academic year gains in a single calendar year… And parents need to understand that.

I feel like it’s when you go on a diet. You eat good for 2 or 3 days and can’t figure out why you didn’t lose all of the weight you were trying to lose. Truth of the matter is that it took weeks months and possibly years to gain all the weight, it’s going to take that long to get it off. When we were talking about these academic losses, they were lost over a years. It would be unrealistic to try to get them all back in a few months.

How to Answer to Campus Administration

There are times when your campus Administration is sent out to help manage and contentious IEP meeting or help be the mediator when parents show up on campus. Their role in the building does not always keep them up-to-date on what you’re doing in your classroom, how the curriculum is supporting your students, or the accommodations and modifications you’re making so that your student can access the materials. So when they promised the moon, they likely don’t even know how out of reach their suggestions might be.

When you’re talking with campus Administration, remind them that if they are going to promise things to parents, team members, or support staff, that they need to also provide the tools you need to deliver on that promise. The onus should not be on you as the teacher, but on the campus and the administration.
Secondly, you’ll want to let your campus now that you are providing instruction at the child’s current prerequisite skill level to give them the academics they need. To do otherwise wouldn’t meet them where they are and truly take them forward. If a kid is working on addition with regrouping and your campus is saying give them algebra problems it’s not meeting them where they are to move them forward, it’s placating a parent and doing a disservice to a child. If you’re going to take this stance, be sure that you have some data to support your opinion. Show how your student is performing on current academic tasks, and also on tasks that are more challenging. Shows data on what that looks like with and without supports, and also what that looks like overtime to show a rate of growth. Your administrator might not know the nuances of what you’re doing in the classroom, but every educator speaks data. So you’re going to have to talk to them in their language.
Finally, as you talk to your campus Administration, remind them that if a child succeeds, they win… But if they fail, we all lose. The campus the administration and the teachers have to sit in the hot seat and answer to why. So we need to be realistic and look at the data to drive these decisions. Promising the moon helps no one.

How to Answer to Students

Ultimately, the person that we are really obligated to serve is the student. Sometimes we get caught up in the lesson planning, the data sheets, and the behavior management and we forget that the student who’s sitting in front of us has a limited amount of time to learn with a teacher. When they graduate or age out of K-12, they are going to have a lot of other opportunities to have direct instruction in the same way again. That means for some of our students what they’ve learned up until the age of graduation is all they’re going to learn throughout their adult life. I guess what that really means is now matters and it matters a lot.

So first off, you do have to answer to your student and one way is by presuming competence. We’ve talked about this and other posts, and I will link that in the show notes. No matter what you need to always assume that your student is perfectly capable of learning the lessons you’re trying to teach them. If they aren’t learning them, it’s not them, it’s you. That sounds harsh, but part of our job is to accommodate and modify materials provide interventions and scaffold skills, and Implement systems to allow the student to be as independent and accomplish as possible. If we make the assumption that a student is incapable or that a goal is unattainable, sometimes that equates to us not providing all of these things to support a student. That is unacceptable. We have to presume competence and maintain high expectations.
Secondly, we have to remember that ready means never. If we continue to wait for a student to be ready to learn more complicated skills by virtue of having mastered basic skills, we’ll never get to the point where they’re ready to learn more complex ideas. An example is being able to count coins. Some students will work on this skill for years and still not get to Mastery level. as a result, their teacher never moves on to giving instruction on Bill because they have not mastered the perceived prerequisite skill. What that means is the student will never have an opportunity to learn how to count and Views bill because they were unable to master coins. This ready means never mentality severely limits our student’s options. It’s imperative that we allow our students to explore more difficult and complex ideas in addition to working on basic skill deficits.
Finally, as the teacher, it’s really important to look at vertical alignment tools to see the big picture and determine what prerequisite skills your student needs to achieve those goals. I would pay particular attention to the goals that the parents have voiced as being important. Here, and for most of our students in self-contained, autism units, or severe mod classrooms, reading is a big one. Taking a few moments to look at the prerequisite skills a student needs to be successful helps us to have a clear conversation with parents and also provide them with a roadmap for skill development. As we throw out IEP goals in meetings, sometimes it can be hard for the teacher and the parents to really have a clear guideline as to where things are going. A vertical alignment tool is the perfect opportunity to talk about where deficits exist and what the learning curve is going to look like. I have a link in the show notes for a vertical alignment tool that you can use to help guide you in this process. Even an early Elementary, it helps to know where a student will end up going in their secondary learning as you devise goals and learning paths for a student. Be sure to bookmark this post so you always have the link.

Remember Best Interest

Lastly, and I’m making no assumptions about you and your students but rather throwing out a general reminder to all that might read this post or share this podcast… we have to make sure that we’re making choices for our students future and their transition outcomes, not what’s easiest for us as the teacher, suggested by our campus, or dictated by our Administration. Rigor means everything right now in light of all of the recent changes in special education law. We have to be sure that we are delivering a quality education to our students, writing IEP goals that are individualized and purposeful, and taking meaningful data that includes Baseline, with and without information, and tracks more than just the goals on the paper.

Let the serve as a quick reminder to always be doing what’s in the best interest of the student.

Get YOUR Question on the next Episode of The Nook!

Thank you so much for the question Brooklyn. I am going to send you out some free classroom materials from the Noodle Nook store so that you can get things going in your classroom. Good Luck. Those of you listening, if you want to have your question answered on The Nook, head over to NoodleNook.Net and click on Podcasts to submit your question.