IEP goals should be “pivotal,” meaning: will they help students with skills that will benefit them in future environments that we haven’t even anticipated yet? (The term pivotal comes from the Teacher Education and Special Education Journal).
Dr. Natalie Holdren says, "We have all these arguments about should [an IEP goal] be academic or should it be functional? Instead of that, we should be wondering, is it pivotal? Is it going to help students with skills that will benefit them in future environments that we haven't even anticipated yet? I think a lot of people in general education will say we're preparing our kids for a world that we don't even know yet in terms of technology. So that's kind of the idea that we're bringing to IEP goals. A lot of times, IEP goals are so focused on these discrete skills that occur in these very specific environments. Really, the more pivotal skills are what do you do in an emergency? Or what do you do when things don't work out the way that you want them to?"
Dr. Andrew Fedders says, "Executive functioning is one area where you can get a lot of different pivotal skills."
He gives this example of an IEP goal: The student will follow directions on their math worksheet and complete it with 80% accuracy.
A more pivotal goal would work across multiple areas: The student will learn to read directions across content areas and determine the best approach to start, work on, and complete an activity.
Dr. Fedders says, "Now, they're still following directions like we were with that math worksheet, but we just wrote a goal that we can really do at any time with academic work, or with vocational work, or even with rec-leisure and hobbies and these kind of things."
Dr. Holdren continues, "I think that a lot of times, goals around literacy will hit hit the standards in these very kind of discrete ways, like 'Student will be able to answer who, what, when, where, why questions about a passage.' That might work for a reader in elementary school where they're anticipating that you're going to be answering those questions, but when a student gets into the higher grades, it might be more functional to teach them how to figure out the meanings of words they're unfamiliar with, like noting a word is bolded and understanding that that means there's a definition for that word in the back, or noting that at the beginning of the textbook there's an outline, and that outline highlights what the author thought were the most important things about the story."
She gives an example of a common non-academic goal: The student will pay attention to the general ed teacher with no more than X prompts.
A more inclusive and more function goal could be: The student will look at their peers if they don't know what they're doing and use visual information to get themselves on track.
She explains, "Things like reading the environment is so much more functional than relying on an instructional assistant to count how many prompts they're giving you."
Hear more about from Dr. Holdren and Dr. Fedders in our article 10 Questions to Ask about IEP Goals.
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