How to Write IEP Goals
An important part of the role of a special education teacher is writing IEP goals. Last week, we talked about how to decide on IEP goals for your students for the semester or year. If you missed it, check it out here.
This week, we are going to go through how you can turn your plan into a measurable IEP goal for your students.
Why Do We Need IEP Goals?
Students in a special education program are working on curriculum and goals that center around life skills. These are based on their very unique profiles and skill sets.
Often these goals are broken down into parts leading to a larger life skill goal. It can take some time for students to meet and master these goals. This makes it important for educators to monitor progress and adjust the goals as students are working toward them.
Writing appropriate IEP goals allows us to have a plan specific to each student. It also allows us to share this information with parents and community services, as needed.
This way, everyone involved in the student’s education can keep track of where the student is with their goals and how they are progressing.
How are IEP Goals Created?
It can be challenging to decide on a goal, and even more challenging to determine how to write that goal. Especially to write an IEP goal in such a way that it can be measured and adjusted as needed.
IEP goals should be specific to the student, to the goal they are working on, and should allow educators to be able to determine when a goal has been met.
SMART Goals
When I create IEP goals, I use SMART goals (which were originally created by George T. Doran). They allow me to know exactly what I am using to measure a student’s progress and to create specific tracking sheets for each goal. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Specific
It seems obvious that IEP goals should be specific. This, however, can be challenging when you are creating multiple goals for one student.
To create specific goals, it is important to know exactly what you want your student to be able to do once they have achieved their goal.
For Example…
If you ultimately want a student to be able to find a date on a calendar, they need to first be able to understand, recognize, and order the days of the week.
The more specific a goal is, the better. If you were to just say that the student’s goal is to find a date on a calendar, this isn’t necessarily specific enough for a student who doesn’t know the days of the week yet.
Measurable
Let’s stay with our example of a student finding a date on a calendar. Simply saying a student should find days on a calendar is not something that we can measure. Especially if they are just beginning with that goal.
What I mean by this is, if a student is learning the days of the week and my goal is to have them find a date on a calendar, they will not be able to do this.
For Example…
If I say that I want them to put the days of the week in order 3 out of every 5 attempts, this is a goal I can measure. I can put this on a tracking sheet, have them work on this goal, and measure how often they are able to achieve the goal.
If they can do this 3 times out of 5, I can increase the goal expectation. If they can do this 1 out of every 5 times, I might need to scale the goal back or change it to something like finding one day of the week from a list of 7 every 1 out of 2 times.
Either way, being able to measure the goal gives us very valuable information as we continue to plan for the student.
Attainable
It is important that goals are not too large or too challenging so that students are able to make progress.
For Example…
Let’s say I have a student’s goal to find the date of a doctor’s appointment on a calendar. When they don’t know the days of the week, then this is a goal that is unlikely to be attainable.
Goals should be just beyond what a student has mastered. Be careful that it is not so far beyond that they aren’t able to achieve it.
Relevant
Relevance seems like an obvious aspect of goal setting. If I make the goal about Science when I am working on calendar skills, it is not relevant to the topic the student is working on.
Try to keep the goals as relevant as possible to the student’s profile and current level of achievement.
For Example…
I will continue to use the finding days on a calendar example. I would keep my focus to aspects of calendar skills like locating a date, an appointment, a day of the week, etc.
Time-Bound
This is one of the most important parts of writing IEP goals for me. It gives a sense of how long we want something to take.
Goals are written so that they pertain to one semester or term. This allows us to adjust goals as the students progress. We then break them down further or go to the next scaffolded step.
In addition to that time frame, I tend to also look at time-bound as how much am I looking for the student to be able to do in that specific amount of time.
Usually I will start a goal with “by the end of the semester…” or “by the end of the term…”. I will also, however, include a specific number of times the student should be able to achieve the goal by the end of the semester or term.
For Example…
“By the end of the semester, the student will be able to put all seven days of the week in order 3 out of 5 times”.
It is important to have something laid out that I want to have happen in a very specific time frame. This allows me to set up data tracking sheets to measure the number of times a student was able to achieve the goal.
This data is so important as you move forward into planning for the next semester or next school year. It tells you if you need to break a goal down further when not mastered. It can also tell you if the student is ready to move on to the next step.
This can also allow you to look at long term planning. You can see if the ultimate goal that you want a student to be able to achieve is realistic for that particular student at that time.
Putting it all Together
Writing IEP goals can be stressful and overwhelming. Having said that, they are so critical to how you will plan your lessons and activities for the semester, term, or year.
Once you have an idea of how to break down a large goal into parts, you can create IEP goals that are specific to the student. You have then gained valuable data about the student’s skills, strengths, and progress.
Thanks for staying with me to the end of this one!! Happy IEP writing and I’ll see you in the next blog!
Be sure to sign up for my newsletters so that you don’t miss the next blog! When you sign up, you will get a free colour matching task box activity sent straight to your inbox. Click here to join!!
Check out my TPT shop or my Etsy shop for task box activities that focus on one specific goal using scaffolded levels to help students progress toward their IEP goals.
Here are a few that you might enjoy!
