Students and IEP meetings

While working on the assignments for class last week, the question came up as to whether a girl, Nicki, should be included in her own IEP meeting. I answered no without hesitation. Obviously this girl was too young, and would only stand to have her feelings hurt or disrupt the process. After class last week, my opinion on that has changed.

While it does make sense that some children would be too disruptive to stay for their entire meetings, it also makes sense that a child should not be excluded simply because of his or her age. After all, should the teachers and parents really be saying anything about their child that they wouldn't want the child to hear? He or she almost certainly almost knows about the difficulty he or she is having in class as well as that the parents and teachers are meeting to talk about him or her. Personally I think I would prefer to be in the room so that I could hear firsthand that those involved were working to help me rather than just to criticize. 

Legally children who are 14 and older in NC have to be included, but from kindergarten age through thirteen, who should stay in the meeting and who should either be excluded or be excused after a certain point? I think that there are a lot of factors and questions to consider, and that there is no one size fits all answer to the question of which children should stay in the meeting or how long they should stay. Here are a few of the questions that I think would be helpful to consider:

• How fully does the child understand his or her disability?
• Does the child have significant behavioral problems that would disrupt the meeting?
• Will leaving the classroom to attend the meeting disadvantage the child?
• How will the child react to necessary criticism? 

I think there are many other important aspects to consider when making this decision. I know that it was mentioned during the chalk talk in class that the discussion of weaknesses might hurt the child's self esteem or feelings. The response to this was that parents and teachers could easily word the necessary criticism in a manner that is not hurtful for the child. This brought up a really good point, that maybe even if the child is not present, we should act like he or she is. This would probably lead to a more respectful tone overall in the meeting. 

After giving this issue much thought, I still don't have an answer to the question of whether or not a child should be included in his or her own IEP meeting. I do, however, know that whenever the question comes up in my career I will make sure that I come to the most appropriate answer for the student that I can rather than answering based solely upon the student's age.

Respect

The conversation we had last week about respect really got me thinking. There were so many different perspectives, and all of them made sense. It made me think of something that happened recently at the preschool where I work. Enrollment is up significantly this year, and the director hired two new assistants to help the teachers out. One of the assistants used to be a second grade teacher, and as a result was really interested in teaching the children manners. She took every opportunity to make sure they said please and thank you, and made sure that they asked politely to be excused after snack or lunch. As far as she was concerned, she respecting the parents by teaching the children to be respectful. Unfortunately, she wasn't thinking about respecting her lead teacher. She was only the assistant, but her lead teacher is a flexible and patient woman. The lessons on "respect" were interrupting and undermining the lead teacher of the class. A child would tell the lead teacher that he or she had finished snack, and the lead teacher would say ok, and tell the child to go throw his or her plate away. The child would get up from his or her seat only to be stopped by the assistant saying "wait, you need to ask 'may I be excused?'"
The teacher felt completely disrespected and powerless in her own classroom to the point that she talked to the director, and the assistant decided she didn't want to work there anymore. In this situation, there was room for a lot more respect than was actually given. The assistant teacher did not respect the lead teacher. If she had simply asked if it was ok to teach the children more about manners and run her plan by the lead teacher, there almost certainly would have been no conflict. On the other hand, the lead teacher waited for two weeks unhappily before talking to the program director, and in that time told all of the other teachers and assistants how unhappy she was. This was not respectful of the assistant teacher or of the situation itself. Finally, by quitting when confronted rather than attempting to work better with the lead teacher, the assistant was again not respecting the lead teacher. By this point things were probably past repairing, but not even trying showed that she didn't have respect for different methods, and that things were not going to work out.
Like in the Crucial Conversations reading this week, it can be hard not to get worked up when someone calls you out for something. In this situation, the only "calling out" was done by the director of the program and was not intended maliciously, but only to make the program better. I think in most cases that we feel "called out" this can easily be the case. We feel like we have to defend our ways, like the assistant did when she left, but in reality if we take a step back to think about where the criticism is coming from it's likely that we'll see our own faults.