To review the session handout(s), click on the icon below:
Brenda Rogers Session 2.2 - Presentation.ppt
Presenters:
Brenda Rogers, Executive Director, Access Center for Education, Irvine, CA
Linda Simpson, Access Center for Education, Irvine, CA
This IEP/IFSP participation training helps fill the gap between professionals and parents in IEP/IFSP meetings. This 3-hour skill-building workshop targets parent advocates, dispute resolution coordinators, school personnel such as teachers, administrators, and school psychologists and others interested in effective IEP/IFSP facilitation. Participants will first be introduced to the social psychological factors that inhibit parent participation in IEPs and a new streamline system for organizing information and data prior to and within the IEP/IFSP in order to reduce social psychological barriers to parent participation, reduce conflict and enhance effective IEP facilitation. The IEP Game (patent pending) is both a training tool and hands on application for preparing for and organizing information within IEP/IFSPs. The IEP Game organizes IEP/IFSP meetings into four categories of information: needs/deficits, evidence, experts, and rights. Each category has a deck of cards. A type of need, evidence, expert, and right is listed on each card within each respective category. The cards are used to arrange the most appropriate configuration of evidence, experts, and rights associated with each need/deficit. Each deck of four categories comes with a mock case that provides the data used with the deck. During the IEP Game training sessions, participants choose from differing training stations where an ACE representative administers the training. Each training station offers a different type of mock case. Each mock case comes with raw test score data, medical diagnosis, present levels of performance, parent observations, teacher observations, and an IEP. Participants work with the data, the cards, and associated fill-in forms to create the appropriate IEP for the mock student. During the training session, the administrator leads participants into discussions that focus on justification for different configurations of cards in order to create the best fit given the needs/deficits, evidence, experts, and rights. By the end of the training sessions, participants have learned to think about the IEP in terms of needs/deficits, experts, evidence, and rights in a way that links these categories together and have engaged in discussions on how these categories are related to one another and applied to actual cases. This training session provides participant preparation, process skills, a format for parent/student trainings in individual districts, and provides online training opportunities for the web version of the IEP Game. The IEP Game reduces conflict in special education by demystifying the IEP process, putting parents and school personnel on the same page by using the same way of organizing information on each case. The IEP Game can be used in each state in the nation. The IEP Game side steps issues of income inequality, educational inequality, and cultural differences by focusing all who use this easily accessible method on four simple categories as the essential elements of all IEPs and contains the parent and school rights within each training deck. The IEP Game has been operated at the International Learning Disabilities Association Conference 2005 and has a waiting list for first production purchases from state leaders within the nation.