Individual Education Plans (IEP) are blueprints specifically tailored to children’s learning needs to help them do their best at school and be successful. It is a fluid document, which means it can be adjusted according to children’s progress or lack of it. Typically children’s parents, teacher, and support staff have meetings at least every report card time to talk about how children are doing both academically and emotionally at home and at school. This gives everybody a backdrop from which changes can be made.
Usually an IEP starts with a paragraph of background information on children. After that is a summary of children’s current abilities and learning challenges, followed by specific adaptations the school is planning to undertake. These might include strategies like giving children more time to write tests, using text recognition software to simplify research, breaking tasks into smaller chunks, or using concrete examples of new concepts. For our son the extra time made a big difference. Sometimes it took him so long to figure out what a question was asking, that he hardly had time left to answer it. This accommodation was also adopted by the university he attended.
Next come educational goal statements, which are broken down into learning objectives, strategies and resources, and methods of measuring progress. This is how an IEP might look: Goal Statement—support Annette with long-term memory retrieval. Objective—use electronic devices to improve recall. Strategies and Resources—encourage Annette to listen to recordings of books, type notes on computer, use calculator for arithmetic. Method of Measuring Progress—teacher and parent observations.
The Individual Education Plan is a helpful tool not only for teachers, but parents as well. Many of the strategies can be carried out at home. Parents can also give valuable feedback on which activities their child likes, is good at, bad at, or frustrated doing.
When it comes down to it, parents play a key role in their child’s success. In 2013 The National Center for Learning Disabilities (United States) interviewed 2,241 parents of children ages 3-18 with learning and attention issues. What they found was that parents could be divided into three equal groups: strugglers, conflicted, optimistic. The Strugglers found the challenges of parenting overwhelming, and they did not hold high hopes for their child’s future. Parents in the Conflicted group accepted their child’s learning challenges, but at the same time had doubts about how to teach their child and get help. They were also frustrated by the school system, and unsure of their child’s academic and social future. The Optimistic group however saw themselves as successful at helping their child and navigating through the school system. They showed little sign of guilty feelings and were confident about their child’s future.
Clearly the group we’d all like to be a part of is the Optimistic group, because their children hold the most promise for success. However, it’s not as simple as making a wish and having it come true. There are many factors that come into play: for instance, parents own education, career success, income, happiness at home, children’s motivation, parent’s motivation, and how prepared parents are to help their children. Thank goodness my husband was reasonably good at math, because we would’ve been a sinking ship if it was all up to me to help our son with high school math. You need to know the course material before you can teach it to your child. Sometimes it takes time to learn whatever it is your child needs to know, which not every parent has.
I don’t know what the answer is to this predicament. A simple solution would be to hire a tutor, but not everyone can afford a tutor. In the end our recourse was to hire our son’s best friend, who happened to an A student in math and chemistry. The two of them met once a week and ploughed through all the material my son couldn’t get at school, capping off their session with a computer game. They were in high school, but I don’t see any reason why this arrangement wouldn’t also work in younger grades. The point is, you may need to get creative in how you support your child.
Many parents believe they are the worse candidate for tutoring their child, and they’re probably right. Few of us are indifferent as to whether or not our child passes a test. Many times I think I felt the pain more than my son did when he didn’t do as well as he expected. The key here is not to set up potentially explosive situations. It was a no-brainer for us who had the brains to help our son with math. The problem became the person with the brains was not the person with the patience. My husband’s biggest challenge was managing his frustration. He could never understand how our son could know his two times tables one minute and not the next. This is when you have to operate as a team. If one parent sees the other one losing it, it’s time to either take over or take a break.
I have to admit, our approach wasn’t foolproof. Some nights there was just too much going on to devote the time needed to help our son. The end result was he went to school without his homework done, which, when you think about it, is not the end of the world either. You simply write an explanatory note to the teacher, and pick up the pieces the next day. I remember feeling stressed out whenever this happened to us; but what I found out was most teachers were more than understanding, and willing to extend a deadline if necessary. The reality is there is only so much time in a day, and there’s no point in forcing your child to do homework when he or she is falling asleep at the table.
I know some parents who gave up on helping their child. Letting our son fail was not an option for us; but, I have to admit, we did considerable propping up. The bottom line was we wanted our son to have choices in his life, the more the merrier. As parents, it is our business to open doors for our children, not close them.
We need to keep in the back of our minds that children may have their car in high gear, but be spinning their wheels. There’s a point of reference I referred to many times: Can he or Can’t he do it, and Will he or Won’t he. In other words, there’s a big difference between a child who can learn his math, but chooses not to; and a child who can’t learn his math, but wants to. With learning disabilities, the problem is not motivation, but the learning itself.
Don’t get me wrong, I too came to the conclusion several times throughout my son’s 13 years of school that he was not university material. Even in grade 12, I told him there was no point in completing the university applications, because he wasn’t going to get in. That’s when he told me, he still had a chance, and he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. So we plugged on, and one by one he shot down the ducks that were standing in his way, and in the end he was accepted to all three universities he applied to. The point is never give up. University or college may seem far-fetched for some, but it doesn’t hurt to point the compass in that direction.
Remember the saying by Leo Burnett, “If you reach for the stars, you might not quite get one, but you won’t end up with a handful of mud, either.”