Welcome to the Student Involvement in the IEP Series, where we will be exploring different ways of involving students in their own Individualized Education Plan, both as part of an IEP meeting and throughout the year. In Part 1, we are focusing on what student involvement can look like.

If you are a teacher who is invested in involving your students in their IEP plans, you may already have a strong idea of what student involvement looks like in some cases and a less clear idea in others. 

After all, in the greater scheme of things, the IEP is just another way of organizing a student’s needs and goals, and some organizational systems simply work better for some people than others. Likewise, some students may express a lack of interest in the IEP process as a whole.

In the big picture, the IEP is simultaneously necessary to complete as a legal requirement and also only as good as the ways that it helps the student it was made for work toward their goals. So while it may be necessary for you to put the IEP together in a certain way, there is plenty of room for creativity when it comes to engaging with students on meaningful choices and conversations about their needs and goals! So let’s think about some strategic starting points.

For students who express a lack of engagement with the IEP process itself, it may sometimes feel like they are not interested at all in thinking about their future! While that may be true in some cases, it can also be true that the issue is not necessarily talking about goals but rather the context of the IEP process. 

If your student expresses a distaste for the IEP process, it can be worth testing the waters to see if there are other contexts in which they feel more open about discussing their goals and what they might want to do to reach those goals. 

It is always worth remembering that the collaborative process you build with your student does not have to mirror the process of the IEP itself, and you can use what you learn to advocate on your student’s behalf in IEP meetings!

One reality of an IEP is that it impacts a student whether or not they choose to actively participate in the IEP meeting. When a student expresses a distaste for an activity or form of measurement tied to a particular IEP goal, we may need to resign ourselves to the reality that some form of that activity may be necessary in the short term but we can also open up a conversation about why that activity is happening and discussing the IEP goal it is tied to. 

Students who may not have had abstract feedback in a meeting setting may have much more concrete feedback to offer when they see it in practice. In a similar vein, when we are on the same page with our students about what goals are most important, they may recognize the way a particular activity is tied to a goal and decide it is worth working on even if it’s not their favorite! 

While getting feedback won’t retroactively fix a goal that turned out to be not so great, it can inform decision-making in future meetings!

The prior section alludes to another common challenge associated with IEPs - making sure everyone understands the connection between the work we are doing and our goals. 

While we can take steps to demonstrate those connections, it is also helpful to have a discussion with students about how their curriculum and learning process are going and gauge the extent to which they are drawing the connections between what they are doing and their goals. 

While it might seem obvious that a student would complain about an activity that doesn’t feel helpful, it is also true that many students may go along with a plan simply because it has been assigned to them, assuming that maybe things will come together if they simply keep at it long enough. 

Creating an environment where students are encouraged to talk about what is and isn’t working can go a long way toward finding activities and learning plans that feel effective for everyone involved.

Some students do not involve themselves extensively in the IEP process or long-term goal planning, and that is OK! It is important for every student to have a meaningful right to self-advocacy, and part of that is recognizing when students need more active support in making meaningful choices pertaining to their IEP. 

One helpful way a teacher can build their knowledge base as a given student’s advocate is to solicit feedback on which activities they like best and least, and take that information to meetings to ensure that goals and measurements are oriented around a learning strategy better suited to your student as an individual. 

Not being able to make decisions about every component of an IEP should not limit a student’s ability to have a say in their own education!

We hope this post has offered some helpful starting points and ways that you can involve a student in an IEP, whether or not they are attending or actively seeking to participate in the IEP meeting. 

If you would like to share your experience involving your students in their IEPs, then we would love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and stay tuned for Part 2, where we will be talking about preparing for the IEP meeting.