Dana Marie (00:00.622)

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Empowered to Advocate podcast. This is Dana Marie. I am solo today with a quick episode on progress. One question that we have been getting quite a bit from parents in the last couple of weeks since school has been back is, how do we actually know if our child is making progress? And this is such a great, great question. I think that we often say things like, you know, we're looking to see that the child is making effective progress, we want to see progress towards their goal areas, we want to see progress in their standardized assessments, their district school-based assessments, so on and so forth. But we never, or rarely, I guess, ever talk about what does that actually look like? How do we know? How can a parent or caregiver of a child with an IEP know if their child is making progress with the supports that they have in place?

with the services they're getting because the reality is if they're not, that means that something needs to change, right? So if your child went all last school year and did not make progress in their goal areas or in a couple of their goal areas, that means that something needs to change or needed to change, right? Maybe the goals weren't written appropriately for them. Maybe they weren't appropriate to their level of what they were learning. Maybe the interventions in place aren't actually the appropriate interventions. Maybe the services in place, maybe they're not enough. Maybe they're not the right services. So making sure that we're keeping an eye on progress, making sure that we're monitoring progress throughout the school year is a really, really important piece of this process. And it's really important to see if a child, if your child is actually getting what they need.

So today I'm gonna talk super briefly about just four ways that we can check for progress. Four things that we can be looking at throughout the school year to see if your child's making progress. Now one I kind of already mentioned. When your child has an IEP, they have goal areas that they are working on. Those goals are tailored towards their needs, what they need to be working on. You should receive and we talk about this often, but you should receive, as often as you receive a report card for your child, a progress report that focuses on those goals. What progress have they, has your child mean towards reaching those goals? Now, most goals are written for a school year or for a calendar year. So in the first sort of semester or quarter you're not going to likely see that your child has reached that goal or is maybe super close to reaching that goal. That's not what we're saying here. But you should be able to see that they are making some progress even within the first couple of months of them working on a goal.

Now, there are so many moving pieces here, right? We've heard from parents who can't even remember if they got a progress report from the school or the district last year. Some who take a look at the notes on the progress report and realize that there's actually no clear data. It's maybe a sentence or two just saying, yep, sure, they're progressing or no, they're not progressing, but no real information to suggest why or why not. Right. So when you take a look at your child's progress reports, if you're in the Massachusetts sort of Boston area, that's likely to be probably around the end of October. When you take a look at those progress reports, you should be able to look at them and there should be clear data to suggest whether your child is on track to make progress in that particular goal area based on the goal that was written for them. Now if there's not, we definitely recommend that you reach out and ask for more information, especially if you're only getting a sentence or two back for those progress reports. But progress reports is way number one that we see, that we look at to see if a child is making progress.

The second way that we determine or look for progress is through evaluation results. Now, your child might be going through an initial evaluation right now. They might be going through their three year re-evaluation this year. Perhaps your child was assessed outside of school maybe over the summer. We work with lots of parents who had their children assessed outside of school through independent evaluations over the summer. Looking at that data specifically around academics can give you at least a good sense of where your child is, what academic skills they have, what academic skills they are still working on. And that evaluation data can be looked at throughout the school year as a way to sort of baseline what progress your child is making. So one thing that also you can do is take a look at previous evaluation data, right? So previous academic data in math, in writing, in reading, has your child made progress since the last time they were evaluated? Now, if the answer is no, same as progress reports, that's an indication that something needs to change, right? Something is not working in the area of services, in the area of interventions, the goals, so on and so forth. S keeping an eye on not just the most recent evaluations that were completed for academics, but comparing them to the last. Now for some kids, that might be three years ago, that's a long time. For some, it might just be a year, a year and a half ago. But taking a look at them side by side to see if there was any growth in academics that way.

Along the same lines of sort of evaluation data and assessments, the third thing that we can be looking at is actual school-based and district-based assessments. Most, many schools and districts have lots of assessments that they do throughout the school year. In addition to state assessments like the MCAS, they might do specific reading fluency assessments in the younger grades, something like the Dibbles. They might use iReady or iXL in online system for gathering data about progress. It's a great thing at the beginning of the year to ask your child's liaison, their school team, what they will be using throughout the year to track data. If your child, as an example, is struggling in reading. A good question for the liaison would be, how are we tracking reading this year? In addition to evaluation data and addition to progress reports, how else are we tracking progress in reading? And like I said, many most school districts, schools have multiple assessments that they use throughout the school year to track progress. But asking what those measures are is a great place to start. And then asking how and when you can expect to receive copies of those results what we find is that the schools are completing those assessments. They are benchmarking your kiddo, but sometimes it gets lost in translation and those results aren't sent home or they're not sent home all the time. So asking what benchmarks are used, what district and school based assessments are used and when and how, like I said, you can expect to see those results.

And then the fourth thing, which is the one that I feel like a lot of folks don't always think of or remember, is it's great to ask for work samples. If you have an upcoming IEP meeting, say you have an IEP meeting in October or November, it would be a great idea ahead of the meeting to ask the liaison or to ask the school team for some work samples. If you're worried about writing, for instance, written expression, if your child has a goal in this area.

If it's something that they're working on, something that you're hoping to see growth in, ask, can I have a couple examples of their writing from the first couple months of the year? Can I have a copy of the rubric that was used to grade it, to benchmark it, so on and so forth? So asking for some work samples, asking to see what they've been working on to kind of get a sense of what their day-to-day school work looks like. When you do that, it's also fair to ask what level of support they were receiving.

So during a writing assignment asking what level of support your child was receiving with somebody sitting right next to them, helping them through the process, or were they just given a little jumpstart, maybe with a graphic organizer or some other template, and then they were writing on their own. All of those things are good to get a sense of what your child is able to do in that particular area, both with support and by themselves. So asking for work samples asking for examples of what they're doing in class. And like I said, a great time to do that is right before an IEP meeting because then you could talk about it. Sometimes teachers, liaisons bring work samples to an IEP meeting, but it can be hard to look at it in that moment and have a robust conversation about it if you've not seen the work samples before. So asking for even just a couple of days, a few days ahead of time would be a great place to start.

Lots of ways that we can track progress. Lots of ways that we can gather data over the course of the school year. Just a reminder, one is through progress reports that you should be receiving, at least as often as you receive report cards. Evaluation data, the last time your child was evaluated, the most recent, maybe they have an evaluation coming up. School and district like lots of different things and lots of different academic areas, but asking what are the school and district assessments that we'll be using this year to track progress. And then finally, work samples, asking the liaison, your child's liaison, somebody on their school team to send along some examples of what they're working on as you prepare for maybe an IEP meeting.

There are other ways of course to check progress. So if you have concerns about whether your child is making not just progress, but effective progress towards their IEP goals, please do not hesitate to reach out and drop us some specific questions or a question about your specific need. We would love to chat more about it. We love to talk about data. We love to talk about tracking progress. So please do not hesitate to reach out with those questions. If you have other things that have been helpful for you also, please share. This is a question, like I said, that we've gotten now a number of times since the start of the school year and as people are going back to school. So it's definitely on the minds of lots of parents and caregivers. That is all for today. Thank you so much as always for joining in, for joining us and for listening to the podcast. And we will be back next week with another episode. Talk to you everybody later.