IEP Components – Practicing Teachers’ Use of Online Tools for IEP Goal Writing and Instructional Support

Practicing Teachers’ Use of Online Tools for IEP Goal Writing and Instructional Support

 

Michael Dunn, Ph.D.

Washington State University Vancouver

 

Mary Rice, Ph.D.

University of New Mexico

 

Abstract

This study investigated special educators’ perspectives about an online toolkit that offers teachers example goals and objectives statements to use in service plans for students with special educational needs as well as teaching strategies and assessments. Special education teachers in a large school district in a Pacific Northwestern state answered a short survey (n=19). Some respondents also participated in group interviews (n=6). The research questions were: what are special education personnel’s perspectives about the online toolkit materials for writing goals and objectives for children with special educational needs; and, what do special education personnel perceive to be online toolkit’s limitations as well as weaknesses? Results indicated that the participants preferred to use the online toolkit for identifying initial ideas for goals and objectives statements in the disability service plans. However, the teachers desired more professional learning and collegial dialogue to learn about instruction, strategies, and assessment tools. The authors also discuss implications and suggested next steps for online tools in professional learning for teachers.

Practicing Teachers’ use of Online Tools for IEP Goal Writing and Instructional Support

Teachers have a varied set of demands and tasks to manage in providing educational experiences for children in an era of technology and use of mobile devices. Typically, teachers of a given grade level will have some students operating above and some below grade/age-level ability in core subjects (i.e., reading, writing, math) as well as social skills. For children who with special educational needs, placement in classes with teachers who have specific qualifications is often a next step (Ysseldyke, 2005). Included in a list of factors impacting special education placement include the use of standardized tests, with their racial and ethical biases, as well as teachers’ race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and years of experience per the child in question (Woodman & Harris, 2018). Once students are placed, special education personnel manage disability service plans in some countries (citations). In the United States, these plans are called Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). An IEP includes short- and long-term instructional and assessment planning in response to a student’s unique strengths and needs (Bateman & Herr, 2011). In recent years, educators have helped develop interventions to address student needs as well as curriculum-based measurement systems (CBM; Deno, 2003; Hosp et al., 2016) to identify specific strategies.

The process for a student being considered for special education services typically follows a referral, assessment, and placement decision process. A teacher (or parent) usually initiates a referral. For dyslexia, the multidisciplinary assessment’s task, traditionally, is to determine if a clear discrepancy exists between a student’s potential (i.e., IQ) versus their academic achievement; the assessment results should also help inform what accommodations and/or modifications are to be provided to the student. If a disability is diagnosed, an IEP will be created and the students will receive special education programming. In the late 1970s, educators and researchers began to question more and more the use of standardized tests for racial biases (e.g., asking a child new to the US the question: what does a US Senator do?) as well as ethical problems (e.g., asking a child to answer comprehension questions about a reading passage when decoding may be an underlying difficulty). In the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA, states were given the option of allowing schools to use IQ/achievement discrepancy or a response-to-intervention (RTI) framework. Educators could use data collected from curriculum tasks in the classroom (curriculum based measurement; CBM) as a guide to school teams about students’ change in skill levels over time. RTI and it’s more recent iteration, multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) as mentioned in the federal general education law (Every Student Succeeds Act, 2015), has teachers use CBM to define students’ strengths and weaknesses, make goals for continuing progress, and discern best practices for instruction. With special education teacher’s having many students on their caseload with varying levels of ability, educators need sources for instructional ideas.

Online tools offer teachers a repository of resources for instruction and for IEP goal development (e.g., Quill for writing, Math Learning Center, Kahoot for teacher-development courses). A growing number of websites offer students and teachers interactive tools to help with reading, writing, math, and other skills (Ferlazzo, 2020). For example, education dashboards are interactive websites that use images, icons, pie charts, graphs, proportionally-sized shapes, etc. to show data and relationships about a student(s). Education dashboards can be used as a decision-making tool to help educators in planning their curricula, evaluating students’ knowledge, and variance in students’ skill levels over time (Xhakaj et al., 2017). Also, dashboards help teachers to better address students’ needs, collaborate with colleagues, and to reflect upon their own practices (Schwendimann et al., 2017). Michaeli et al. (2020) used quantitative and qualitative methods, within the framework defined by the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) Standards for Educators, to investigate Israeli elementary teachers’ use of education dashboards and the impacts on their professional growth. Michaeli et al. concluded that the teachers’ use of education dashboards positively contributed to the extent to their professional growth as facilitators, analysts, and designers.

Little is known about how teachers perceive web-based tools and what their intentions are for using them. New technologies are often presented to teachers without advanced collaboration (Snoeyink & Ertmer, 2001; An et al., 2017). To better understand how teachers use a web-based tool, this study focused on one tool provided to teachers in a large urban school district in the Pacific Northwest.  This study entailed a mixed-methods design with an online survey of teachers describing their perspectives about online web tools as well as follow-up semi-structured interviews with six special education teachers about the tools.

Research Questions

1. What are special education personnel’s perspectives about using an online toolkit for writing goals and objectives for students with special educational needs?
2. What do special education personnel perceive to be online toolkits’ limitations as well as weaknesses as a source of personalized professional learning?

Review of Literature

Reading, writing, math, social skills, and social-emotional learning are some examples of the foundational aspects education that students are expected to progressively master in each successive grade. For example, 25% or more of students cannot write at a basic level (e.g., NAEP, 2017). Low-performing and disadvantaged schools often lack the internal capacity to improve (OECD, 2012, p. 113). Yet, the purpose of public education is to address these issues and provide inclusive practices as, “…an integral element of the expression and realization of universal human rights” (United Nations, 2007, p. v).

For children who are placed in special education, the school team and parents/guardians are to meet to write an IEP that contains information about the student’s present levels of performance, goals for increasing performance, and services that will be offered to support the goals. Curriculum standards and state test results provide a starting point for this process (e.g., Common Core State Standards, 2020; Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, 2020). The goals are decided by the school team, which consists of a representative administrator from the local educational agency (usually the school or district), a general education teacher, special education teacher, parents, the qualifying young person, and other related personnel, such as therapists. However, drafting the language of the goals is usually the responsibility of a special education teacher. Despite the importance of this responsibility for making a bridge between present levels of achievement of future success as well as dictating the services students will need to achieve, special education teachers receive little initial preparation in goal writing and other paperwork associated with the student’s IEP (White & Mason, 2006). Therefore, special education teachers often experience difficulties and need professional learning experiences and other supports to assist them in learning this skill (Alberta Education, 2006; Manitoba Education Training and Youth, 2001; Mattatal, 2011; Seigel, 2000).

Special education teacher professional development has included a focus on a goal-setting model from business management called SMART—Specific, Strategic, Manageable, Attainable, Realistic, Relevant, Results-oriented, and Time-bound (Prather, 2005). However, writing goals that meet all of these criteria poses substantial challenges for teachers (Mattahal, 2011). The difficulties arise because writing a goal with all of these qualities is a highly technical endeavor. In addition, students with disabilities often have multiple areas within a content area where they are unable to demonstrate their knowledge to the level their peers can. Thus, it is often overwhelming to identify all the possible goals and then choose the most important among them. Moreover, some subject matter receives more attention than others. These areas include reading and writing proficiencies and numeracy performance (Hessler & Konrad, 2008). As a solution, some have proposed Curriculum Based Measures (CBM; Deno, 2003; Hosp et al., 2016). When operating from a CBM approach, teachers must:

determine a student’s baseline score, or current performance level, and combine it with empirically established performance standards or rates of growth, to predict year-end achievement results. These year-end results can be written as goals, and progress toward the goals can be monitored on a regular basis to determine how well the student is learning (Mattahal, 62).

While CBM usage may hold some promise in supporting teachers’ strategic choices of goals, one can see from the definition above that there is considerable technical and evaluative skill that goes into determining a goal. Also, CBM professional development does not inherently teach teachers to write the goals per SMART requirements. Finally, CBMs are limited to areas of reading, writing (including spelling), and mathematics because these are the only areas that are directly tied to curriculum most classrooms (Hosp, Hosp, & Howell, 2007). Other goals that might be critical for students, but do not fit within CBM parameters or might not lend themselves to articulation as SMART goals are often left to the wayside. Some examples of these difficult to write, but important goals include problem solving skills, creativity, communication, and physical tasks.

The move to professional learning experiences using online tools might have potential to improve opportunities for teacher to learn to write IEP goals. However, when Author2 (2017) interviewed 14 special education and general teachers from seven states about the topics of their online professional development related to special education, no teacher reported IEP goal writing as a topic. Instead, much of the professional learning was focused on team building, sharing announcements, and determining how to implement IEP goals that were already written. Thus, while an IEP goal might seem like a simple sentence, it is a source of considerable complexity and frustration for special education teachers.

Special Education Teachers’ Use of Online Resources

To do their work, teachers need resources (Wolgast & Fischer, 2017). The internet is a source for many such resources, but locating and vetting them takes time. Studies of teachers’ use of online resources suggest that teachers spent substantial amounts of time using search engines to look for ideas for lessons (Moore & Chae, 2007; Shapiro, Sawyer, Dick, & Wismer, 2019). To circumvent this need to evaluate resources some teachers are willing to pay out-of-pocket for lessons and other materials that were created by fellow teachers—with the sense that because teachers created them, they are inherently more trustworthy (Shelton & Archambault, 2019). However, there is some debate over whether teachers have the right to sell content that they generated with their employers’ resources and using public school children as the pool to test and pilot their products with the knowledge and consent of the children or parents.

For special education teachers specifically, Billingsley et al. (2011) highlighted some of the online resources that special education teachers could use (e.g., cast.org; interventioncentral.org). However, they did not identify online resources that were specific to how to write IEP goals—which is one of the tasks that special education teachers struggle the most to do (White & Mason, 2006). Even so, these researchers did identify several resources for enhancing content knowledge, using teaching strategies, conducting assessment, designing behavioral interventions, and making space for professional connectivity and self-care.

While online resources in special education have some advocates, there is also research suggesting that using online resources is not a positive activity. For example, Sawyer and Myers (2018) found that early childhood teachers used online resources less than their elementary teacher counterparts. The analysis of their data led them to believe that elementary teachers lacked practicum experiences compared to the early childhood teachers and, therefore, the elementary teachers were using online resources to compensate. The implication of those findings was that when special education teachers have strong preparation, they do not need to resort to online resources. If this conclusion is widespread in teacher education, then it stands to reason that special education teachers would be hesitant to draw on online resources, even if they were struggling to generate lessons, direct behavior, or construct technical documents.

Strategy Instruction

Instruction is part of a multi-element process in education. While the content and application of information via strategies is often what people view as most visible in school, teachers should have a clear sense of a students’ current level(s) of functioning to choose and define goals for next steps in programming. For these reasons, instruction should be driven by assessment. Strategies and classroom practices can then be paired with the students’ needs. Specificity in goal writing helps everyone on the IEP team know and address what the target tasks are (Jung, 2007). Furthermore, the Individuals with Disabilities Education improvement Act (2004) stipulates the need for instruction to be research/evidence based. Some educational entities have initiated their own systems to suggest to educators what types of strategies/instruction meet research/evidence criteria (e.g., Council for Exceptional Children [Cook et al., 2014], American Speech-Hearing Association [2004], National Center for Response to Intervention [2020], and the What Works Clearinghouse [2020]).

Self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) is one example of a highly-effective instructional practice. Graham et al. (2014) meta-analysis of SRSD research concluded an effect size of 1.14. Through a teacher’s review of SRSD’s six steps of analyzing students’ work samples, choosing a new strategy to offer students that address areas of students’ weakness(es), explaining the new strategy to the students, modeling the steps, offering the students guided practice with the teacher, and students’ attaining enough proficiency to maintain the strategy in memory and for application in other similar activities (generalization; e.g., a story writing strategy that could also help with writing an historical narrative; Author1, 2016, 2015), students can improve their skills over time and potentially meet their goals and objectives. While there is fidelity of implementation in the process of controlled research studies, this may often not be the case in teachers’ day to day instruction. The demands on teachers’ time and limited professional learning for mapping research/evidence-based instruction for students’ goal attainment can render fidelity of implementation to be a challenge (Capizzi, 2008; Jung, 2007). The Reading Recovery (Clay, 1993) literacy intervention for first-grade struggling readers may be one example. While there is sufficient research to classify it as a research/evidence-based instructional program per the criteria of the Council for Exceptional Children and What Works Clearinghouse, as two examples, there is also a wealth of evidence that illustrates Reading Recovery as not effective. The program is also costly (e.g., one teacher: one student over eight or more weeks for 30 minutes per day).

Providing students with appropriate opportunities to learn can be challenging for teachers to manage (Taub et al., 2017) given time, personnel, and resource limitations. Teachers appreciate tools that can help to formulate a student’s goals/objectives within a four-types-of-curriculum framework: intended, planned, enacted, and assessed curricula (e.g., Kurz, 2011; Kurz et al., 2014). For teachers of students with disabilities, these four components can prompt significant barriers to providing opportunities to learn such as curriculum content (e.g, that teachers of students with disabilities feel led to focus more on functional skills as compared to academic content), access to what is offered in general education classes or other educational contexts, established communication systems for engaging in instruction (e.g., alternative or augmentative communication), and instructional materials and supports (Kurth & Keegan, 2014). The authors discussed the reality of many special education teachers’ having the role of case managers as compared to primary instructor. Teachers are challenged with high caseloads, ongoing paperwork tasks, supervising paraeducators, assessing students, creating adaptations, collaborating with other educators and families, and many other roles. To create quality adaptations requires extensive time spent with the general education teacher as well as creating appropriate materials and activities that fit a student’s goals/objectives as well as strengths and weaknesses; this reduces time for direct instruction with students. The practice of special education for a student is a multi-component process; but in reality, it can be too large for one teacher to manage. Teachers’ “interesting ideas” and chosen activities carry the hope of learning.

Methods

The authors employed a convergent parallel mixed methods design (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009). The quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed independently and over a contiguous timeframe. The results of both methods were then brought together and analyzed concurrently to allow each set of data (qualitative and quantitative) to inform the results and interpretations of each method (McCrudden et al., 2019; Schoonenboom, & Johnson, 2017). With an online survey, a large group of special education personnel answered their perspectives about the strengths and weaknesses of online tools as well as how often and for what purposes each respondent used them. The first author observed in-school Building Assistance Team (BAT) meetings (N=4; each one hour) where educators discussed students’ progress with short- and long-term goals. The follow-up, semi-structured interviews provided the opportunity for the self-nominated subgroup to offer more details about their use, likes, and dislikes of the online tools. The authors received human subjects’ approval to complete the study.

Setting

Participants were special education personnel in a large school district in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The district had almost 25,000 students enrolled with 71% regularly attending. The gender distribution was: 48% female, 52% male, and 0.1% gender X. Race/ethnicity was: American/Alaskan native 0.4%, Asian 6.1%, Black/African American 2.8%, Hispanic/Latino of any race(s) 25.3%, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander 2.1%, two or more races 8.9%, and White 54.4%. Students’ success with curriculum standards were: about 50% for English/Language Arts (ELA), about 39% for math, and about 40% for science—including high math (31%) and ELA (27%) growth.  About 14% of the students enrolled had a disability.

There were about 1,700 teachers (72% female, 28% male) with an average of 13 years teaching experience. Their race/ethnicity distribution was: American/Alaskan native 0.2%, Asian 1.8%, Black/African American 1.1%, Hispanic/Latino of any race(s) 3.4%, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander 0.4%, two or more races 2.3%, and White 88.8%.

Participants

A total of 19 special educators completed the survey: 10 elementary, 4 middle school, 2 high school, and 3 teachers who were itinerant at two or more of these levels. Their assignment types were: 7 learning support, 3 social communication integration programs (SCIP), 4 academic learning classrooms, 2 learning support/SCIP, and 3 speech and language pathology. Six special educators participated in the focus group interviews (three per interview). Table 1 contains additional information about these participants.

Table 1

Participants’ Descriptive Information

Pseudonym name	Role	Years in Education	Race/Ethnicity
Bill	High school special education teacher	22	White
Evan	Middle school special educator	4	White
Kathy	Speech and Language Pathologist, elementary/secondary schools	10	White
Lauren	Elementary special educator	29	White
Cynthia	Elementary special educator; Grades 3-4 SCIP	3	White
Nancy	High school special education teacher	16	Mixed

Instrument Development

Survey. The survey included questions such as: the respondent’s school type (e.g., elementary, secondary), teaching assignment, frequency in accessing online tools, what component(s) (e.g., goals, present levels wizard, strategies), percentage of time spent on each component, what each respondent liked or did not like about online tools, the impact of their use on students’ learning, and if the respondents experienced any barriers in using online tools. To ensure the validity of the content of the survey, the researchers consulted previous research noted in the literature review. They also collaborated with district special education administrators regarding what they would like to know about how teachers used the online webtools.

Qualitative Interview. The authors created the interview questions from existing research and the areas of content included in the online webtool (e.g., goals and objectives, instructional resources). The second author’s evaluation research also helped inform the content of the questions. The results of the online survey also helped inform follow-up questions that could be posed during the interview’s discussion. Also, the first author attended and took notes about educators’ discussions about students’ progress with short- and long-term goals during a series of building assistance team (BAT) meetings. They included the school psychologist, special education teacher, and related services personnel (e.g., speech and language pathologist). In the meetings, there was no mention of online tools specifically. The team discussed specific behaviors or recent challenges and trends; academic programming was not a prime topic. The team would formulate some next-step strategy ideas. This information was used to determine what teachers’ concerns might be as they approached the use of online tools.

Data Analysis

Survey. The authors reviewed the descriptive statistics provided by the survey’s respondents to determine the frequency across the Likert-scale range for each question. Respondents could also offer comments to help explain their answers.

Group Interviews. For qualitative data analysis, the authors used a five-step thematic analysis approach (Gale, Heath, Cameron, Rashid, & Redwood, 2013). They divided the thematic analysis into five steps; they individually completed steps 1-4 and later met to compare notes and complete step five. The five steps were: 1) reading the data multiple times to become familiar with the content; 2) identifying categories as well as overarching subthemes; 3) cross-referencing our notes to the research questions to participants’ ideas; 4) using participants’ verbatim keywords to correspond to the coded themes; and 5) reviewing the matrix within and across participants to develop coherent themes and possible explanations of interviewees’ comments and ideas (Creswell & Clark, 2018). Table 2 contains examples of coding data.

 

Table 2 Example Coding of Interview Data
Coding labels	Sample Quotes	Notes and Ideas
Resources, goal selection	I need a broad spectrum of activities to help have choices to be of interest to students. Resources with social goals is a helpful component too to have in a resource. (Elementary/secondary special educator).	Student activities need to be high-interest. Integrating academic with social skills goals helps with this.
Present levels of performance goals.	The present levels of performance have been useful for me in terms of a summary; I edit the phrasing to fit my students’ profile. (high school special educator).	Edit provided goals as needed,

After a preliminary set of themes was developed, the researchers worked to reduce these to salient themes that would illuminate the research question. The final themes are shared in the results section.

Limitations

The survey sample for this study was small and homogeneous. The invitation was sent to only one district as they, being a large school district in its region, had invited the researchers to attain online tools user’s perspectives about the tool. Some teachers expressed that the demands of their teaching assignments did not provide time for participation.

Results

This study explored teachers’ views about online instructional resources and tools. Participants completed an online survey (N=19) and six agreed to be part of a follow-up group interview.

Survey Data Results

The survey responses are provided in Table 3.

Table 3

Survey Questions and Responses

Question	Responses
Type of school	Elementary 53% Middle school 21% High School 11% Multiple levels or district wide 16%
Educator’s role	Learning Support 37% Social Communication Integration Program 16% Academic Learning Classroom 21% Multiple roles/related services (e.g., SLP) 26%
Frequency in using online tools	Daily 5% Weekly 32% Monthly 26% Bi-Monthly 5% Periodically/As Needed 32%
Purpose in using online tools	Goal Writing 63% Strategy Ideas 5% Multiple Purposes (e.g., tool’s multiple features) 32%
Satisfaction with online tools for IEP and Special Designed Instruction Development	Extremely Satisfied: 10% Very Satisfied: 60% Somewhat Satisfied: 10% Somewhat Dissatisfied: 10% Very Dissatisfied: 0%
Satisfaction with online tools for behavior tools and practices	Extremely Satisfied: 17% Very Satisfied: 32% Somewhat Satisfied: 42% Somewhat Dissatisfied: 9% Very Dissatisfied: 0%
What is your overall opinion of online tools	Extremely Satisfied: 22% Very Satisfied: 54% Somewhat Satisfied: 12% Somewhat Dissatisfied: 12% Very Dissatisfied: 0%

The reliability analysis of the survey used the items on a scale comprising four Likert items. Cronbach’s alpha showed the questionnaire to reach acceptable reliability, ? =0.88. All items appeared to be worthy of retention as the range of means was 3.4-4.2 (SD=1.9-2.1).

Qualitative Interview Findings

The themes and subthemes of the findings from the semi-structured focus group interviews are presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Themes and Sub Themes

Theme 1: What an Online Professional Resource Tool should Entail

While goal writing is an essential part of special education, daily activities with students provides the process to help students improve in their skills to improve and hopefully attain a given goal. With the district not providing curriculum materials, teachers must find and develop their own while working to address the Common Core State Standards. “High interest material is a must. I have no need for videos. Books with high-interest pictures are much better” (Bill, high school special education teacher). Managing these materials with paraprofessionals as the instructor adds another requirement: “A curriculum resource has to be something I can give to an assistant that they can do and manage.” An elementary/secondary speech pathologist added: “I need a broad spectrum of activities to have choices that are of interest to students. Resources with social goals is a helpful component too to have in a resource.” Evan, a middle school special educator, commented about teachers’ needing to create their own activities. “I design lessons with my own content. I find Newsela, superteachers.com, education.com, and Reading A-Z great for adapting to lower levels.” To improve online tools, Bill commented during the group interview.

I would rather online tools be modified to offer even more ideas for goals—to help me strategize for the next steps in a student’s programming. For high-needs goals, it would help for online tools to have more ideas for student activities.

Bill’s explanation reflects an interest in additional support for students who have significant challenges. He expressed a clear desire for more materials that would help him spend his time well with students.

Theme 2: Goals and Objectives Writing

The interviewees found online tools’s goal and objectives lists as the most useful component for them to use. Bill commented that he,” cannot imagine trying to manage goal writing without it; Online tools makes goal writing quicker and easier through the drop-down menus and clicking the buttons to make a goal. He then copy/pastes into IEP Online.” Like Bill, Lauren too, “would like easier transfer from Online tools to IEP Online. It would help if online tools and IEP Online were more seamless.” Yet, she also mentioned that there is the provided phrases need editing as only adjacent grades levels are offered for a given goal. It can be difficult to reword a goal and have it retain the same meaning (e.g., setting component of a goal). How should a teacher edit a kindergarten-level goal for a student in fifth grade?”

The interviewees liked online tools for goal-and-objectives writing too. Kathy voiced a common summary: “Online tools helps the educator to write individualized goals. The strategies are helpful to general education teachers too. I think it is an awesome resource!”

Evan: I think online tools is the best for goal writing in special education. I can find lots of operations/math goals. I have heard that online tools offer even more goals resources for modifying to a lower grade level.

Cynthia: Online tools helps me find relevant goals to the standards and grade levels. I also use other sources for adaptive skills’ goals. Online tools are useful for 70-80% of the goals that I write. Online tools help me to write more correct and effective goals to guide learning.

The emphasis in this explanation is on finding a goal that is structurally correct and that will facilitate students’ learning. The teachers were most satisfied when they felt like they could take a goal and use it with little to no modification.

Discussion

The authors’ aim for this study was to explore teachers’ perspectives about online tools as a webtool for goal and objectives writing for students’ academic, social, and behavioral programming. The research questions were: what are special education personnel’s perspectives about online tools as a useful tool for writing goals and objectives; and, what do special education personnel perceive to be online toolkit’s limitations as well as weaknesses? From the survey, observation of BAT meetings, and interview data results, the participants stated that they liked using online tools and would like more professional learning to learn how to use even more of the tool’s features.

Most of the participants stated that online tools helped them create better goals and objectives for students’ IEPs. Online tools helped to fill the professional learning gap (Alberta Education, 2006; Manitoba Education Training and Youth, 2001; Mattatal, 2011; Seigel, 2000; White & Mason, 2006). The participants liked how online tools was aligned with the Common Core State Standards (2020). Although the goal and objectives’ phrasing did not always match with IEP Online, the school district’s chosen cloud service for IEP files, online tools offered ideas and an initial phrase that the teachers could then edit into what they wanted to use.

Some teachers mentioned that the strategies component of online tools was the most helpful part of the tool. They would like to have more professional learning opportunities about how to pair strategies with IEP goals. Strategy instruction with engaging activities provides a means for students’ skill levels to improve (Graham et al., 2014; Taub, McCord, & Ryndak, 2017). Online tools or similar programs might consider short, asynchronous online webinars, or provide online facilitators to support teachers.

As for weaknesses and limitations, the participants perceived an insufficient amount of content for high school. While online tools offered good ideas, some teachers expressed that they often had to craft their own goal and objective phrase to address a skill or concept. Providing additional materials for secondary learners would help address the time teachers spend searching for resources (Moore & Chae, 2007; Shapiro, Sawyer, Dick, & Wismer, 2019). Online tools could also offer more for behavior and adaptive (life) skills.

Implications for Practice

Online tools seemed to be important for teacher learning for the teachers in this study. This district and others who offer online tools or similar programs should consider offering more professional learning opportunities to learn about the programs. Specifically, this professional learning should include practicing teachers as presenters to promote teachers’ learning, collegial sharing, and dialogue, which as an important recommendation from the teachers in this study.

Moreover, additional professional learning should focus on supporting the teachers in moving from the learning goal to the strategies in the online tools (or similar) program, but it cannot end there. An additional element is needed where teachers are then supported in determining how to make activities with the strategies to teach particular subject matter.  For goal writing, the professional learning should include information about teacher judgment and the goal writing process in general, rather than just showing teachers the technical steps of using the tool.

Future Research

A future study could include teachers from multiple districts that offer participants the use of online tools or similar programs. Indeed, we need to know more about how teachers’ make sense of particular tools for use in their practice. Researhers also need to know more about how efficacious teacher professional learning about technological applications is translated into practice. Finally, there seems to be important need to prepare teachers better to write goals and customize them for students. Research base on this topic could be greatly expanded at both the preservice and in-service levels. While there seems to be no harm in giving teachers examples to work from, students might be better served if teachers were better prepared to compose and revise the goals for better individualization for students. Surely, just copying and pasting from a selection of goals was not the intention of IDEA (2004). Even so, examples of instructional activities can be a help to teachers, and more research about which crucial teacher tasks can be supported by webtools should be pursued.

Conclusion

This study examined special education teachers’ perceptions of an online toolkit. Teachers appreciated the support for their instruction, but they had difficulty imagining how to move from goal to strategy to activity. Future research might tackle the problem of providing more support and extended modeling for teachers. This support might consider teachers’ need to understand the entire event of intention, planning, enacting, and evaluating instructional materials using online resources (Kurtz, 2013). Teacher education might also consider ways to ensure that teachers understand the use of online resources as a positive or at least neutral activity in their professional development.  

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About the Authors

Dr. Michael Dunn is an associate professor of special education and literacy at Washington State University Vancouver ad teaches undergraduate and graduate courses applicable to K-12 educators. His areas of research interest include skills/strategies for struggling readers and writers, and multi-tiered systems of support. Dr. Dunn’s research accomplishments include 38 journal articles, one edited book, nine book chapters, 56 conference presentations, and six funded external grants. He taught in Toronto (Ontario) area elementary/middle schools for 11 years. His student caseload included learning disabilities (reading, writing, and/or math) as well as other disability types. Dr. Michael Dunn’s recent awards include: the Organization of Teacher Educators in Reading (OTER, a group within the International Literacy Association) chose his 2011 published manuscript in their Journal of Reading Education as the 2011-2012 Outstanding Article Award; and in 2012, the College of Education awarded Dr. Michael Dunn the Judy Nichols Mitchell Research Fellow Award, which provided $10,000 for his research in each academic year across 2012-2015. 

Mary F. Rice is an Assistant Professor of Literacy at the University of New Mexico. She earned her PhD in Curriculum and Teaching from the University of Kansas. At KU, Mary was a graduate research assistant at the Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities. Prior to earning her doctorate, Mary taught English as a Second language and reading support classes in public schools. Her research and teaching focus on digital access and curriculum accessibility in educational settings.