Welcome back to our Transition Planning Series, where we are taking a closer look at planning a student’s transition to life after high school in the context of a student’s IEP and through the school year. 

In Part 1, we focused on finding more ways to involve your student in their transition planning process. In Part 2, we checked out some starting points for involving the wider local community in a student’s transition plan. 

In Part 3, we are going to take a closer look at implementing a transition plan throughout the year. After all, an excellent transition plan means very little if we cannot agree on how to take productive steps toward meeting those goals or which goals are most important in the first place!

By treating the transition plan as a collaborative project, we can check in and make sure we continue to be on the same page throughout the year while reinforcing that working toward our long-term goals can be a process for which we regularly plan and adjust as we identify areas of progress and run into setbacks. 

Here are some basic starting points for establishing the beginnings of a transition planning process with your own students, which you can adapt to fit the needs of students as you learn more about their goals and what works for them.

So let’s dive in!

An important starting point of putting any transition plan into action is identifying the goals outlined in the plan, making sure everyone is on the same page about how those goals are prioritized, and checking whether any goals need to be revised or adjusted. Laying out those goals together and identifying any concrete ways of measuring those goals that are already included in the plan can go a long way toward informing next steps and breaking down year-long or even multi-year goals into more manageable pieces.

Once we have our goals clearly established, we can begin to identify concrete steps we can take in the coming month to work toward those goals. 

One challenge of tying concrete tasks to goals is that it can be difficult to establish a sense of progress when the ways of measuring it aren’t necessarily applicable day to day. One helpful way to frame this reality is to identify steps tied to practice versus those tied to process. 

Practice-oriented steps might be more focused on the more abstract medium and long-term goals of building up our skills in particular areas. Process-oriented steps, on the other hand, might be specific tasks we need to complete to make sure we continue to be eligible to meet a particular need or achieve a particular goal. 

A good example of practice might be trying different executive functioning strategies for working on various school projects. A good example of process might be sending out college applications in time for them to be considered for the coming school year. 

Consider together as a team what practice steps might be most helpful in the short term and what process steps need to be completed by certain deadlines to make sure your student continues to be on track toward their goals!

Once we have an idea of what we want to do, a helpful next step can be to apply those steps to an organizational structure, whether that is a daily schedule or weekly/monthly calendar. Laying out the plan for the month helps make it easy to visualize, check tasks off the list, and remember the direction everything is headed. 

One helpful way a teacher can both show their investment in the project and remind the student that their needs are important is to set due dates for themselves on the same plan when necessary. For example, if you plan to include a member of the community in a transition goal related to finding a job, sharing what you intend to do to make that meeting happen can be a great way to show that your student deserves to have updates on how things are going and that you are truly working together rather than just giving commands. 

It is much easier to remain enthusiastic about working toward abstract goals as a team than as an individual simply receiving instructions from another individual.

One reality of working towards our goals is that if we are successful, the steps we need to take to progress will inevitably change to reflect our progress and new needs. In that sense, trying to plan out an entire year of activities with a student based on one meeting can be an incredibly tricky and daunting task. 

Instead, we can check in at the end of each month to ensure we are on the same page about how things are going, make sure we still feel the same way about how our goals are prioritized, and identify helpful next steps to take. So, at the end of each month, consider starting this process all over again with everything you’ve learned from the last month!

We hope this post has offered a helpful framework that you can adjust to fit your own needs and the needs of students you are supporting. With a little bit of planning, foresight, and personal investment, we can help students feel active in working toward their own future, advocating for their own needs, and getting invested in their own plans. 

If you would like to share your own experience working with students on transition planning, then we would love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and start tuned as we round out this series (for now!) with Part 3.