Angela Kulcsar shows how to use curriculum maps from The Autism Helper to write IEP goals with real benchmarks. She walks through Math Level 2 and Reading Comprehension Level 1, showing how to track skills across units and use built-in pre and post-test data to prove student growth at IEP meetings.
Curriculum Access users or Level Daily Curriculum users, this video is for you. If you have students and you are struggling to write IEP goals, I want to show you how I use our curriculum map to help guide me when I am creating goals and benchmarks. So I am going to pull out math level 2, and I'm going to take a look at some of the goals that I can create just using this curriculum map. As a reminder, it is best practice not to mention a curriculum in an IEP goal. Why is that? Well, if the child moves or if your district decides not to use that curriculum anymore, well, guess what? Now you have to rewrite every goal. What we really want to identify in a goal is where the deficit is for the student and how we're going to meet that deficit. So we are identifying in the present levels that the child has a deficit, and this is where they're currently performing, and this is where we want them to perform, and the goal helps us get there. There's benchmarks within that goal, and no matter how your district sets that up, the curriculum at The Autism Helper can definitely help you move forward in the right direction and kind of help guide you and create some of those benchmarks. The curriculum map is really, really easy to use, and this may or may not work for you depending on your school district and their requirements. So this is just something that I did in the classroom based upon my state and my district standards, and it might be helpful to you. Here I've got a binder. This is just math, uh, Level Daily Math Level 2 student workbook page. But here's the curriculum map. And so this is really what I want to show you today, is how you can use this curriculum map in your IEP goal planning. So let's say that I've got a student who needs to work on addition, okay? In my curriculum map, I've already given the placement test, and I know that this is where my student needs to be on level 2. And I'm gonna start going through the curriculum map and looking for addition. And so I've got one here in unit 2, I've got one here in unit 3, another one in unit 4, another one in unit 5. Okay, these now build upon each other. So when I look, I've got adding 0 through 5, adding 0 through 7, adding 0 through 9, and adding 0 through 10. These would make great benchmarks. Here's another example. I pulled our Reading Comprehension Level 1 curriculum, and here's the curriculum map. So I'm going to start scanning. For this one, I'm going to say that my learner needs to identify letters within a word, um, and so here they're identifying the first letter in a word, the last letter and then finding letters within a word no matter the position. So this is just an example of how this curriculum map can help you see how skills build upon each other as you move through, um, you know. And then here we move to identifying letter sounds, and that carries through all the way. But this gives you some really good ideas for benchmarks that you're already scoring on. So all of the work is in here, it's all ready. And there's daily data to practice. So for example, Unit 1, we're again looking for that first letter. So I'm just going to turn to a few pages here in Unit 1. You can see I'm on Unit 1, page 14. Down here, students are going to circle— or color, excuse me— the ones that have the first letter circled. So here, obviously that's not the first level letter, but here it is the first letter. So students are going to color 7. Here they'll color lunch. Here they'll color 10. And so on. And so students are practicing this skill here in Unit 1, and they practice that skill frequently. Here's page 5, you know, they're practicing it here. Here on page 6, they're doing it again. There's multiple ways that students are going to be practicing this as they go through Unit 1. And here in the pre-test and the post-test, you can even see that because that was something that was covered in our curriculum map, we actually have it in our formal assessment rubric as well. So when we give a pre-test and a post-test, we're going to do the pre-test before we teach the unit, we're going to give the post-test after we teach the unit. It takes about a month to teach a unit depending on your students. Some go faster, some go slower. But you can see number 2 right here, circle the first letter in each word. So here I've got a formalized assessment that's going to show me the pre-test or the post-test score. Then I'm going to be able to share this with parents. This is a really, really great way to be able to show student growth in a way that is data-based. You're making data-based decisions. We're analyzing errors here. We're telling you exactly what to do and how to do it and how to meet the needs of the students in your classroom. Then when students are ready to move on to Unit 2, we're gonna be working on last letter. And so we again are gonna give that pre-test and post-test. And then we are going to be looking at number 2, circle that last letter in the word, and look for student growth as I teach that. Um, so, you know, as I go through the curriculum, you're gonna see students practicing that skill again. Um, here it's down here. So students have a lot of opportunities to practice that skill throughout the student workbook. The thing about writing IEP goals is that when you have data, it's not really that hard because the data will always point you in the right direction. And so when you're using a curriculum like this that gives you really good pre-test and post-test and solid skill analysis and a path and a plan to help you be able to get where you want students to go, IEP goals kind of write themselves. And so you can bring this information to the IEP table, you can present it to all of the stakeholders, and you can say, hey, here's a proposed goal based upon the data that we have. And that's going to make your job a lot easier because now decisions are not based on where you think you want the student to go, but they're based upon data and hard evidence that you have gathered to be able to show, hey, this is where my student is, this is where I want them to go, and this is the path and the plan that I propose we come together to work on and to get that student there. Um, and with a curriculum like this that spirals, it's going to constantly be keeping those skills in maintenance, which I love as a special educator.
