February 29, 2008

IEPs in the 21st Century

For the last month I’ve been cleaning out ancient corners of our house to prepare for a major renovation. We’re turning it into a 0-5 research and early intervention center, as well as a preschool. So 100 years of stuff has to be examined to see what we do with it. Most of this month I’ve lived in a cave of books in cascades around and over me- my grandparents’, Mom and Dad’s, goodies from library sales and thrift shops, my husband’s science texts. Then, of course, there is our own individual love of books, those given to our children that they left behind, and the inevitable addiction to the physical beauty of the page and the words themselves. I sit there boxing them into categories to give away and get drawn into the exquisite phrasing of the 1800s, the evolution of words and print through the 1900s to cover escalation of information about every facet of ourselves, our planet, and what may float our souls in the infinite solar systems beyond. All of this mirrors human history at a time that all bets are off for the future except one- human development is always the same.

What if I was 25 again and raising a disabled child to live in this century? How could I incorporate my belief system and values into a set of experiences that would lead to my child’s independence and success 20 years from now? How do I bridge the richness and subtlety of the past with what they need to know about global warming, staying healthy in a changing climate, recycling, cloning, space travel, interacting with life on other planets, and the necessary balance between the technology that has taken over our lives versus our need to experience the social family by touch and smell and all of the senses that hang in suspension in front of the computer? How are social skills to be taught if children are alone with their computer for hours and days? If they choose to text message and communicate by cell phone with those in the same house rather than speak to them directly? Is My Space, You Tube, and all of the other Internet places where people expose the most intimate aspects of their lives of instructional importance? How are family values to be understood when there are fewer and fewer families in any sense of that word? One must not put a value judgment on any of this for it is an inescapable fact of life and surrounds every child in America today. As such, it carries with it an instructional imperative.

There feels to be a line of generational demarcation starting about age 45. Teachers and special educators older than that, either physically, mentally or both, often have a terrible time thinking about the future when they are frozen with core curriculum standards and state requirements that must appear in IEPs. We are drowning in tidal waves of information and change at a time that my boxes of books are going to rebuild the New Orleans Public Library and there are children across our country still using textbooks from the 1950s or have no books at all. So it is not only keeping up with the Now, but closing the gap with Then. That also means that young teachers learn the history of what came before them so that there can be a dialogue shared across our cultures and ages. This balance must appear in how IEPs are written today but does not.

This week a young special educator had agreed to evaluate a 3 year-old child she hadn’t seen since the youngster was three months old. A day before the assessment she learned that the child had epilepsy. She did not know what to do and sought to download a form with a test instrument she could use. She was a caring and concerned professional who wanted to do a good job for this child. It was not her fault that she had not received the training she needed to understand how to handle this situation. But that is that state of teacher training today. Many still think of what sits on the neck of a child as a black box and have little understanding about how the central nervous system works. The chasm between current science and teacher training is as deep and as broad as our failure to update the programs and support services of the children we teach and evaluate. Maybe if they go as a pair, teacher and child together, into a cubby of books with Alice falling into the looking glass, they could find the Wonderland of today that flows through tomorrow. Echoes of yesterday hang like stalagmites and stalactites above and below. They crawl through the sensory-motor cave and finally arrive at formal operations with moral judgment and abstract reasoning that empowers them both to shoot for the moon. Galactic flight is a beautiful thing.