Your Shortcut to Saving Time, Staying Organized, and Supporting Every Student
Special education teachers don’t need more on their plate. They need more hours in the day.
That’s why we created the NASET Support Squad: your one-stop hub for classroom-ready worksheets, checklists, forms, and time-saving tools designed specifically for special ed professionals.
Whether you’re juggling IEPs, prepping for meetings, or managing your caseload, we’re here to take the edge off. Our goal is simple: give you back a few precious minutes every single day.
Here at the Support Squad, you’ll find:
✅ IEP templates and compliance checklists
✅ Behavior tracking forms and progress monitoring tools
✅ Classroom visuals and printable supports
✅ Planning aids, parent communication forms, and more
Created by educators, for educators.
We’ve been where you are. We know what works.
Join the Support Squad and spend less time creating materials from scratch and more time doing what you do best: supporting your students.
Website updated every Friday by noon. To get early access to our worksheets, subscribe and read The Exceptional Edge newsletter every Friday at 530am EST!
12.19.2025
Data is the language of special education. It tells the story of growth, need, and effectiveness, but only if we collect it intentionally and use it wisely. High-quality data transforms IEPs from compliance documents into instructional roadmaps. This worksheet helps educators build systems for collecting, interpreting, and applying data to improve student outcomes and strengthen team collaboration.
Families want to understand how their child is doing, not just whether goals are being “met.” Transparent, compassionate communication builds partnership and trust. This worksheet provides templates, sample language, and timing tools for sharing meaningful progress updates that reflect both data and humanity.
12.12.2025
Inclusion isn’t a placement, it’s a mindset. Effective leaders build structures that ensure all students, regardless of disability, background, or language, belong and learn together. This worksheet provides strategic actions, reflection tools, and system-building templates for leaders seeking to transform inclusion from philosophy into sustainable daily practice.
The goal of special education is strategic independence. Adult help should fade as students gain skills and confidence. When we over-support, we risk learned helplessness. When we fade intentionally, we empower students to self-advocate, self-monitor, and succeed on their own. This worksheet gives teachers and paraprofessionals clear guidance on when, how, and why to fade adult support effectively and ethically.
12.05.2025
An IEP meeting can feel overwhelming for parents, but it doesn’t have to be. Families are equal members of the IEP team, and preparation builds confidence, clarity, and collaboration. This toolkit helps parents understand the process, gather information, and prepare questions to make sure their child’s voice and needs are fully represented.
Extended School Year (ESY) services prevent substantial and significant skill regression during long breaks from school. ESY is not summer school. Rather, it’s a continuation of special education designed to maintain essential skills so students can continue progressing toward IEP goals. This worksheet helps teams understand eligibility, documentation, and decision-making for ESY through a data-informed, student-centered lens.
11.28.2025
Students with disabilities are disproportionately affected by trauma—from early adversity, chronic stress, or experiences of exclusion. Trauma impacts attention, memory, emotional regulation, and trust, all of which are core components of learning. Trauma-informed classrooms recognize this reality and respond with predictable, compassionate, and restorative practices that promote safety and growth rather than compliance and control.
11.21.2025
A Behavior Intervention Plan (BIP) is not a punishment plan; it’s a teaching plan. Its purpose is to replace challenging behavior with new, functional skills that help students get their needs met in more appropriate ways. Too often, BIPs become paperwork exercises instead of actionable roadmaps. This worksheet provides a clear step-by-step process, practical templates, and examples to help teams design, implement, and monitor BIPs that actually change behavior.
IEP and special education meetings can feel like alphabet soup. This glossary translates common terms and acronyms into clear, plain language, with quick “what this looks like” examples and questions you can ask to stay informed and confident.
11.14.2025
Behavior goals should be precise, inclusive, and equity-centered—not generic statements like “Student will improve behavior.” Effective goals are clear, measurable, and grounded in data while recognizing the diverse needs and identities of students. This worksheet introduces the SMARTIE framework—adding Inclusive and Equitable to the traditional SMART model—so educators can write goals that are both instructionally sound and socially conscious.
Predictability is prevention. When students know what to expect, they feel safe—and safety is the foundation for learning and self-regulation. Inconsistent routines, unclear expectations, or unpredictable adult responses create anxiety, power struggles, and behavior escalation. This worksheet equips educators with proactive, research-based Tier 1 strategies to build classrooms that are structured, calm, and positive for all learners.
11.07.2025
Annual IEP goals can sometimes feel overwhelming: “Student will improve written expression” or “Student will solve multi-step math problems” are too broad to teach, measure, or monitor effectively.
IDEA allows (and encourages) teams to break down these broad goals into objectives or benchmarks, which act as the “stepping stones” toward mastery.
This worksheet provides educators with tools, examples, and templates for breaking complex skills into manageable, trackable objectives.
An IEP overloaded with 10–15 goals may look ambitious, but in practice, it spreads resources too thin. Staff feel overwhelmed, data collection becomes inconsistent, and students make little progress across too many targets.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) does not require a specific number of goals – only that goals are measurable and address the student’s most significant barriers to accessing the curriculum and environment. This worksheet provides a framework for setting high-priority, high-impact goals that drive meaningful student growth.
10.31.2025
Confusion around accommodations, modifications, and adaptations is common, even among experienced educators. These terms are not interchangeable, and misunderstanding them can lead to compliance errors, inconsistent implementation, or barriers for students.
This worksheet provides a clear comparison chart, concrete examples, case scenarios, and quick checks so educators can confidently apply the right supports in IEPs and 504 Plans.
Self-regulation doesn’t happen in isolation. It develops within relationships. Students learn to regulate emotions, attention, and behavior when caring adults provide co-regulation: modeling, scaffolding, and supportive presence.
This worksheet gives educators clear frameworks, practical routines, and ready-to-use scripts to embed co-regulation in daily practice, supporting students across all tiers.
10.24.2025
Parents are guaranteed specific rights under IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). These protections, known as procedural safeguards, ensure families are informed, involved, and able to resolve disputes.
While families must receive a copy of safeguards at least once a year, educators often struggle to explain them clearly and practically.
This worksheet translates the legal language into plain educator-friendly terms, highlights key parent rights, and provides scripts, scenarios, and educator tips for real-world application.
Transition planning isn’t just about writing goals, it’s about preparing students for real life after high school. IDEA requires measurable postsecondary goals (education, employment, independent living) by age 16 (some states earlier).
Strong transition plans use checklists, authentic assessments, and collaboration with outside agencies to set students up for success. This worksheet provides ready-to-use tools, checklists, and collaboration strategies to strengthen transition IEPs.
10.17.2025
Copying and pasting from one IEP to another may feel like a shortcut, but it can result in serious compliance issues, inaccurate information, and poorly individualized plans. Families notice, advocates notice, and due process hearing officers notice.
A “copy/paste” IEP undermines trust, reduces accountability, and, most importantly, fails to meet the student’s unique needs.
This worksheet helps educators identify signs of copy/paste errors, understand the risks, and apply practical strategies to write authentic, individualized IEPs.
IEPs that focus only on deficits can feel like a list of problems, creating a negative tone that frustrates families and demoralizes students. Strengths-based language reframes needs as opportunities for growth, highlights student abilities, and sets a positive, collaborative tone.
This worksheet provides sentence stems, before/after examples, and practical tools to help educators write IEPs that are compliant, professional, and uplifting—without sugarcoating or ignoring areas of need.
10.10.2025
The Present Levels of Academic Achievement and Functional Performance (PLAAFP) is the engine of the IEP. A strong, data-rich PLAAFP tells the student’s story right now and directly drives goals, services, accommodations, and progress monitoring.
This worksheet gives you concrete templates, sentence stems, exemplars across domains, and a crosswalk that links every PLAAFP statement to the rest of the plan—so your IEPs are coherent, actionable, and easy to implement.
Student-led IEPs shift the focus from adults talking about the student to students having a voice in their education. Even young learners can share their strengths, preferences, and goals when supported with the right scaffolds.
Research shows that student involvement increases engagement, self-determination, and postsecondary success. This worksheet provides practical strategies, sentence stems, scripts, and templates to help students actively participate in their IEP process.
10.03.2025
General education teachers are critical members of IEP and 504 teams, but many feel overwhelmed by the long lists of supports in student plans. Accommodations don’t have to be complicated: they’re everyday adjustments that remove barriers so students can access grade-level content. This worksheet highlights the most common, high-impact accommodations, provides classroom-ready examples, and includes a quick-check toolkit for teachers to confidently support students.
09.26.2025
This guide provides educators with clear, actionable strategies for recognizing and responding to escalating behavior. By understanding the escalation cycle, educators can intervene early, prevent crises, and maintain safety and dignity for all students.
Many students, including neurodivergent learners, struggle to navigate the complexities of friendship. They may misinterpret social cues, overgeneralize trust, or assume all relationships operate at the same level. Teaching students to recognize different dimensions of trust helps them build healthy, reciprocal relationships, avoid misunderstandings, and respond effectively when conflicts arise.
09.19.2025
The Participation in the General Education Setting section of the IEP is not just a compliance checkbox. It is the heart of a student’s right to access meaningful learning and social opportunities alongside peers. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), students must be educated with their nondisabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate.
Effective participation language in an IEP should reflect a commitment to inclusion, backed by specific supports and a clear rationale for any time spent outside the general education classroom. This worksheet provides tools, checklists, and examples that you can apply in your next IEP meeting or classroom planning session.
This guide is designed to help educators recognize and respond to students’ sensory needs by matching observable behaviors with practical, low-barrier classroom supports.
While not a substitute for an occupational therapy (OT) evaluation, the strategies outlined here can strengthen access, self-regulation, and engagement for all learners.
These strategies are meant to be flexible, preventative supports that can be embedded into everyday classroom practice, not just reactive measures when students are dysregulated.
09.12.2025
This goal bank is designed to provide educators with up-to-date, strength-based, and inclusive examples of goals and objectives for students with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) in the areas of Reading, Math, and Writing.
Executive functioning (EF) skills are the mental processes that enable students to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully.
Students with challenges in EF – including those with ADHD, autism, or learning disabilities – benefit from explicit support and scaffolding.
This guide provides practical, classroom-ready strategies educators can implement immediately to strengthen EF skills across settings.
09.05.2025
IEP meetings are critical opportunities for collaboration between educators, families, and students. When meetings are well-structured, all team members leave with a shared understanding of the plan and a commitment to implementation. This guide outlines three common IEP meeting types, provides sample agendas, and includes strategies, scripts, and checklists to help you plan and conduct meetings that are productive, compliant, and student-centered.
Transition planning is a required part of the IEP process that prepares students for life beyond high school. Under IDEA, transition services must be in place no later than the first IEP in effect when the student turns 16 (age 14 in many states) and must be reviewed and updated annually.
Effective transition planning provides a roadmap for postsecondary education, employment, independent living, and self-advocacy.
This worksheet offers a step-by-step structure to ensure every transition plan is actionable, student-centered, and aligned with the student’s goals and abilities.
08.29.2025
Co-teaching is an evidence-based approach that allows two or more educators to share responsibility for planning, delivering, and assessing instruction for a diverse group of students. Studies show that when teachers intentionally implement co-teaching models, students with and without disabilities demonstrate stronger academic growth, improved social-emotional skills, and higher engagement.
Paraprofessionals are essential partners in supporting students with disabilities. Effective collaboration between special educators and paraprofessionals ensures consistency, reinforces instructional goals, and improves student outcomes. This toolkit provides clear role definitions, communication strategies, and actionable tools for maximizing collaboration.
08.22.2025
Both 504 Plans and Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) are legal tools that ensure students with disabilities can access and succeed in school. While they share the goal of providing equitable access, they stem from different laws, serve different purposes, and have distinct eligibility criteria, processes, and protections. This quick-reference guide is designed to help educators understand the differences at a glance.
Comprehensive, SMARTIE-aligned examples with data-driven benchmarks, progress monitoring tools, and actionable educator guidance.
08.15.2025
This worksheet provides a framework that integrates academic, behavioral, and social-emotional supports for all students.
08.08.2025
This worksheet provides teachers with a ready-made, easy-to-understand reference guide to support students with IEPs. Organized by category and tiered by intensity.
This worksheet helps teachers integrate quick, meaningful SEL practices into the first 5–10 minutes of class. These warm-ups build trust, boost belonging, and create space for emotional check-ins. This is especially important for students with IEPs, trauma histories, or anxiety about school.
