We Were Never Taught to Write Goals for Autistic Kids

JOIN THE WAITLIST FOR DITCH DOCUMENTATION DREAD BOOTCAMP HERE! It is eight o'clock at night, you have multiple IEPs due, and you are somewhere on page five of Google searching communication goals for autistic students. Everything coming up is either the exact kind of goal you are trying to get away from, or it is so vague you already know it will never fit. Rumor has it we have all been here. This episode is Nicole being honest about something that brought her shame for years: she used to write goals she did not believe in, and goals she sometimes did not even understand. She traces where that came from, why the format most of us use has no clear origin, and what has to happen before you can write a goal worth writing. Fair warning, she gets a little fired up about 80% accuracy. She always does. WHAT YOU'LL HEAR INSIDE THIS EPISODE - The confession she says is hard to make out loud, and why she is making it anyway - The goal with four competing numbers in it, and what it was actually measuring - Why she overthought goals until she was right back at square one, and what that actually came from - What her first job taught her about writing goals you are allowed to change - The evaluation tools that were never built to show how an autistic child communicates - What grad school actually covered, and the one thing it never covered at all - How most of us really learned to write goals, and why that should worry us - What the research says about goals that are not appropriate for the child - Why communication functions grow together instead of stacking on each other - The scissors example, and why communication is not a task - Who decides when a child gets to communicate, and why "opportunities" answers that question badly - The bubbles, the lid going back on, and asking again and again for the data - Why 80% accuracy still annoys her, thirteen years in - What she is teaching at the live bootcamp in October