Tag: IDEA

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“They Will Never Need This Math”

As a parent of a child with a disability and as a math educator, I am repeatedly struck by the fact that a group of adults (educators and professionals) convene to discuss and plan how to help a child. A great deal of time, resources, and money is concentrated on that child. Awesome! Unfortunately, in math education I frequently encounter situations in which this collective energy is concentrated on math that is more about boxes to check than engaging the student in math that he or she will need in post-secondary life.

IDEA enumerates the purpose of special education, with the transition goals aligned with employment, living skills, and future education that are desired for each individual student. This is explicit and aligns with the goal most teachers likely have, to make a difference in the lives of their students.

Despite this, when I am called in to help with math programming for a student I often find the math being presented to the student is not aligned with the post-secondary goals and often appear to the result of following the general ed curriculum, by default. Here are some examples.

  • I co-taught an algebra 1 class with a student impacted by autism to the point that he needed a paraprofessional guiding him through the daily work. He worked in isolation with the para and struggled with the basic elements of the course. It was not until his junior year that he was moved to a consumer math class. 
  • A senior was in a consumer math course I taught. The course was for students who could not access the general curriculum, yet her transition goal for education was to attend a community college. This setting likely require a math course (that did not have consumer math topics) and a placement test.
  • I was called in by a district to help a 10th grader who was not grasping the basic math or pre-algebra that was presented for months. He was showing significant task avoidance. The postsecondary education goal was for him to attend a community college. I started algebra work with him immediately and he was grasping it.
  • Over 25 years of teaching math I have periodically heard educators minimize the struggles of students with math with the rationalization “they will never need this math.” My response is to ask why “then we are presenting this math to them?!”

So what math do they need? Here is a list of blog posts that address this question. In short, here is what I share with IEP teams, educators, parents, and special ed teacher candidates I teach.

  • If the goal is a career that involves a 4 year degree, then boxes must be checked. The student will have to have the math courses needed to get into the college and to prepare for the math in his or her major. This is the “mathy math” that will be on a college placement test as well.
  • For a 2 year degree at a school with open admissions, the focus of the high school math can be narrowed to the math course required (if any) and on the placement test. Typically, this would involve a focus on algebra. For the aforementioned 10th grader, we did not cover geometry and prioritized the algebra topics to cover. 
  • For a vocation, cover the math needed for that vocation. For example, I worked out a long range plan for 7th grader whose mother shared that may work in an auto repair setting. The math needed for that vocation is measurement so the plan focused on measurement and life skills/consumer math. 
  • For another middle school student whose goal was to have a job and to be as independent as possible. He loved sports and his mother said he would love to work in a sports related store. For him I recommended data and statistics (not the mathy type but meaningful and applied stats and data) to help him make sense of and discuss sports stats. This was complemented by a recommendation for consumer math.

Students should be presented the math they NEED.

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Shopping at the Grocery Store

There are numerous hidden tasks that we undertake while at the grocery store. We process them so quickly or subconsciously that we are not aware of these steps.

As a result, we may overlook these steps while educating students on life skills such as grocery shopping. Subsequently, these steps may not be part of the programming or teaching at school and therefore generalization is left for another day. Yet, the purpose of IDEA is, in essence, preparing students for life, including “independent living.”

To address this, we can take a task analysis approach in which we break down the act of shopping at a grocery store into a sequence of discrete steps or tasks (see excerpt of the task analysis document below).

Step 1 is to administer a baseline pretest during which we start with no prompting to determine if the student performs each task and how well each is performed. As necessary, prompting is provided and respective documentation is entered into the table (to indicate prompting as opposed to independent completion). For example, I worked with a client who understood the meaning of the shopping list but started off for the first item without a basket or cart. I engaged him with a discussion about how he would carry the items. At one point I had him hold 7 grapefruits and it became apparent to him that he needed a cart. (I documented this in the document.)

Other issues that arose were parking the cart in the middle of the aisle, finding the appropriate section of the store but struggling to navigate the section for the item (e.g. at one point I prompted him to read the signs over the freezer doors), and mishandling the money when prompted to pay by the cashier announcing the total amount to pay.

Step 2 is to identify a task or sequence of tasks to practice in isolation based on the results of the pretest. For example, this could involve walking to a section of the store and prompting the student to find an item. Data collection would involve several trials of simply finding the item without addressing any other steps of the task analysis.

Step 3 would be to chain multiple steps together, but not the entire task analysis yet. For example, having the student find the appropriate section and then finding the item in the section.

Eventually, a post-test can be administered to assess the entire sequence to identify progress and areas needing more attention.

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Standards Based IEPs

At the turn of the century education has seen a standards based reform movement, e.g NCLB. IDEA 2004 reflects this with a change in the focus of an IEP towards curriculum standards. What does this mean? The focus of academic based IEP goals and objectives should be strictly aligned with the curriculum standards. This helps to make the general curriculum accessible for all students – to the extent possible.

For example, in the past a math IEP objective may be written based on weaknesses found in psychological tests regardless if this was in the curriculum covered in the life of the new IEP. Maybe a student had trouble with calculations with fractions on the testing so an objective would focus on improving these types of calculations even if the class was not going to cover calculations with fractions.

These new types of IEPs are called Standards Based IEPs. Here are a couple of links.

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Purpose of Special Education

purspose of special education

After taking a course in special education law I have come to realize that most parents and educators, including many special education teachers, do not know the purpose of special education. I am not an expert but have researched the issue beyond simply reading IDEA. Here is a file with slides (including the one in the photo above) from a presentation I give on this topic.

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