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 areas. (See previous Blog!!!)

We need to use a collaborative approach to encourage families and professionals to develop a meaningful educational program designed to address all the student needs...

 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 ANY conflict or have ANY disagreement, and when to start acting as an active focused advocate for their child in the IEP process. There is guilt and angst associated with this process. Many parents...

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 one’s level of appropriate participation. It is not being tolerated! It is not enough to simply be present in the classroom.

Successful authentic inclusion is about being a VALUED member of the...

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 communication that accompanies verbal communication that indicates a degree of involvement, i.e., clenching one’s fist as you declare that you are angry. That nonverbal certainly emphasizes that...

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 how pragmatic language difficulties can impact a student and some of the various skill areas that may need remediation and support.

Language is the - what, how and when to say it, verbally or...

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 the story, the weather was described as "raining cats and dogs" and the childs' behavior became a classic example of a lack of executive functioning.

The 20 executive functioning skills listed below...

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 understand how people think, figure out social relationships, predict behavior and solve social or interpersonal problems as they arise.

Theory of mind develops as children gain greater experience with...

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.

Hidden curriculum can wreck havoc with self esteem and motivation especially with teens. There are lots of social rules that are rarely expressed but always enforced and it is your knowledge and...

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 internal and external social, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and motivational skills across multiple environments, novel situations, and persons so to respond and communicate in socially...

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 means.

Joint attention is the co-ordinating of the attention of two or more persons towards an object or event and occurs every 30 seconds or more. Poor joint attention is linked to poor language...