How to Set Appropriate IEP Goals for Reading & Writing

Hey there! How’s it going?!

If you were with us last week, you know we were talking all about the 2 Types of Student Support Plans. You can check that blog out >>>here<<< if you missed it. As a quick review, we have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) and 504 Plans.

Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) are great because they provide support to help close the gap.

To close the gap, we need to have appropriate goals based on individual student needs. As part of an IEP, goals are set in specific areas. If a student is struggling in a specific area (e.g., language skills, motor ability, reading, writing, math, etc) they should receive goals in those specific areas.

Strong Reading IEP goals should be based on the 5 Core Components of Literacy

1 - Phonological Awareness

2 - Phonics

3 - Reading Fluency

4 - Vocabulary Development

5 - Reading Comprehension

Now the goals being developed should be specifically aligned to a student’s strengths and weaknesses in those areas which means that the testing as part of the IEP needed to address each of these core areas. Now if you know us, you know we love bringing things back to the literacy processing triangle which equates to students’ ability in the three core neural/brain processes required to read and write.

Based on data and performance on tests in each of these areas goals should be drafted. Now the same triangle truly applies to writing, that being said we have other areas we also want to look at when we are considering writing IEP goals.

Strong Writing IEP goals should be based on the 3 Core Components of Writing

1 - Content

2 - Mechanics

3 - Structure

The three neural/brain processes that must come together for writing include being able to come up with content and actually put together thoughts based on the topic, then being able to structure sentences and paragraphs appropriately using the appropriate syntax (the way we speak), and then finally we need strong mechanics. When a student has poor writing we need to consider each of these areas separately.

Again, we need to be sure that we have data. We need to know (based on data) where students are struggling so that we can write effective goals, and then we need to be tracking data around those goals to make sure students are making progress.

>>Click here<< to check out the blog - How to Determine Which Data Needs to be Tracked and be sure to grab our free Data Tracking System. This tool will help make data tracking easy and help you keep your session data organized.