Your child’s IEP goals are essentially a set of instructions for what the team wants your child to accomplish by the end of the year. Dr. Caitlin Solone, a special education advocate and a faculty member at UCLA, suggests that parents look at the “most essential standards to address this year” and use them to “inform your goals.”
Rachel Quenemoen, who for decades worked at the University of Minnesota as the senior research associate for the National Center on Educational Outcomes and the project director for the National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC)–and continues to serve as a technical advisor to the post-NCSC Multi-State Alternate Assessment states–adds that while the ultimate goal is for a student to have access to the general curriculum to the greatest extent possible, she discourages parents from listing the specific standards or Core Content Connectors on an IEP.
Instead, she encourages IEP teams to write goals based on what will give the most access to the content that their peers are learning.
For more details, see our article Core Content Connectors and Essential Understandings.
