Special Education Advocacy TODAY!
SEAT Blog
Making the System Work FOR You
WHAT SHOULD PARENTS DO WHEN THEY DON’T AGREE WITH THE SCHOOL SYSTEM REGARDING AN IEP? They can disagree with the school system regarding any of the 3 areas of IEP Appropriateness, IEP Compliance, or IEP Discrimination. You can choose only one of the...
3 REASONS YOU CAN DISAGREE WITH AN IEP
Knowing them will allow you to know what type of assistance you need to resolve any disagreements and what actions to take.
It is hard for parents to know when to stop being the “nice cooperative” parent to a fault, afraid to cause...
Authentic Successful Inclusion
Is it enough to have a child with learning challenges in the classroom for that room to have the label of an inclusive class? What needs to happen in order for the distinction of inclusion to be applied to that class?
Successful authentic inclusion is measured by...
Studies tell us that 55% of communication is nonverbal (Albert Mehrabian, 1967).
If that seems a little extreme to you, it is probably because we take so much of that type of communication for granted. Most of us recognize when someone is upset or excited. There may be nonverbal...
Now What? Seems to be a constant state-of-affairs for those who have pragmatic language issues. It is very easy to confuse different language demands for different listeners or situations. Who teaches all those rules for conversations and how do you know the joke is funny?
Today we are looking at...
While working at an elementary school, I became aware of a first grader who suddenly became visibly upset, crying, and screaming about the blood, the bodies, and how terrible it all is. It did not take very long to realize that he was reacting to the story the teacher was reading to the class. In...
THEORY OF MIND
ToM or Theory of Mind is the ability to identify others’ mental states (beliefs, knowledge, emotions, and intentions) and use them to understand, predict, and judge others’ thoughts, behaviors, and language. ToM allows us to build a social world where we can...
Hidden Curriculum
For a teen, there is nothing worse than violating a social rule that everybody else knows and therefore becoming the butt of jokes and ridicule. Recovery, at least at that moment, for the teen seems impossible and the teen is sure that everybody is going to hate them.
...
Functional social competence is the effective and fluent use of social awareness, social processing, social skills, and social cognition to interpret and analyze social environments and use social behavior to achieve one’s individual and group goals. This is done through the flexible use of...
This Dad and his child are engaged in what we call joint attention. I will grant you it is pretty early on but the skill does tend to emerge between 6-14 months. It is also another one of those skills we take for granted because most of us have never heard of it before and we do not know what it...
Anyone know why a person with a PhD is working at a fast-food place? If you think it is because they may not have very good social skills, you have maybe 20% of the answer. Actually, they may have some very reasonable social skills; however, like most topics connected to learning, the...
POSITIVE TACTICS FOR NEGATIVE BEHAVIOR
When I was teaching life skills in a high school, I had a non-verbal student whose reaction to a perceived challenge of almost any kind was to rock violently at his desk, scream at the top of his lungs, and bite his finger down to the bone. It did not take...