Improvement for ALL
We often hear from teachers outside of the regular education classrooms how difficult it can be to adjust Continuous Improvement concepts for their non-traditional situations. I asked for feedback about that issue from some of our special education teachers and received the following response.
Andrea is a teacher in our program that addresses the needs of children with severe mental and physical disabilities. Skeptical at first, Andrea has found a way to incorporate Continuous Improvement concepts into her classroom that she has found to be both fun and meaningful.
“Progress is sometimes hard to see with my students - or comes very slowly, but it was really rewarding each month to see on the graphs that they really WERE improving as a class.
If you are training special ed teachers (especially those with lower functioning kids) and they are having a hard time with class goals, you can suggest what I did. Since they all have goals on their IEP's anyway, I looked at which ones were common and picked those areas for class goals. For example, all of my kids have some kind of communication goal and an independence goal. Since the IEP's are data driven anyway, there is no "extra" data to collect for 'Continuous Improvement'. The only extra step is coming up with a class total. My kids enjoyed coloring in the bar each month and clapping and cheering when the bars went up. I'm not sure they really understood the meaning, but I was able to work in fine motor skills and communication into a 'Continuous Improvement' activity.”
Thanks, Andrea!!!
Paul
