Goals are central to the IEP process. Getting the goals right can be the key that opens the door to a great IEP for your child, ensuring not only that they can make progress but also make meaningful progress in the right areas, and for the rest of their lives.

Goals will be individualized to meet each individual student’s needs, and they should be measurable and appropriately challenging.

Maximize AAC effectiveness in your child's IEP. Find practical goals and examples to support your child's communication journey.

Your child should be progressing from year to year, which means updating their IEP with new goals that are specific and measurable. Learn how to tackle goal-writing with these tips for parents.

The most effective goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely (SMART). Learn tips from an education advocate for writing challenging yet appropriate IEP goals.

What should you avoid when writing goals into your child's IEP? Learn some important do's and don'ts from an IEP expert.

Hear a special education expert explain why you should be using inclusive language when writing your child’s IEP goals, and get tips for how to craft those goals to help your child be fully included at school.

A vision statement outlines future goals for your child. Learn from a special education expert about how a vision statement can help guide your child’s IEP and provide a positive framework to pursue a full life.

If you're new to IEPs, learn from an education specialist what to expect before, during and after the IEP meeting so that you can set your child up for success.

Every child deserves an inclusive education, and IEP goals can help provide the framework. Learn from a special education expert tips for how to write inclusion into an IEP.

Inclusion can aid your child’s success in school, and it can be written right into their IEP. Learn why and how to write IEP goals that promote inclusivity in the classroom.

Learn how to write standards- based goals in an IEP that help kids achieve success in school.

Kids benefit from an inclusive education, but how do you make it happen? Learn steps for using your child's IEP to promote inclusion in their gen ed classroom.

Get creative! If your child responds to music or is skilled at singing or playing an instrument, you can incorporate music into their goals. Any skill such as typing, sign language, or other strength that helps your child learn better can be part of their IEP goals.

When you’re identifying your child’s strengths, remember to focus on the whole child — not just percentages, numbers, and data from school records. Once you identify your child’s strengths, own the fact that you know your child’s abilities and passions better than any other person on the IEP team.

Strength-based IEPs are effective because they focus on the whole child — not just a child’s disabilities. Focusing on the whole child means writing IEPs in a positive way that honors a student’s abilities, possibilities, interests, and support needs.

Because IEPs are the documents that teachers first read when they get new students, IEPs shape their first impressions of our kids. Strength-based IEPs foster self-determination, self-efficacy, self-control, and academic achievement.

The key to meeting IEP goals is getting people to step out of the mindset that certain things need to be in an order. For example, if a child is never going to learn to write, they can learn to type! Undivided Content Specialist and parent Karen Ford Cull explains in this clip.

Compare the previous year or two to this year’s baselines to determine whether progress has been made. If not, have a discussion with your IEP team about why progress has stalled.

Undivided's Education Advocate, Lisa Carey, says that IEP goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented, and Time-bound.

Short-term objectives (STOs) and/or benchmarks are steps that measure the student’s progress toward the annual goals in their IEP. When written correctly, short-term objectives provide teachers with a roadmap and a clear mechanism to assess the child’s progress.

IEP goals (academic and/or functional) are designed to enable the student to be involved in and make progress in the general education curriculum. The purpose is to set clear and measurable goals for the student to work on in the upcoming year in each domain with a demonstrated need.

All IEP goals are measured by number data — this means that there should be a number or some form of quantitative data to support these statements. If there is no number attached to that goal, request it and request the data that was collected to track that goal.