Organizing for Smart Goals Podcast by David Poeschl.


Hello, my name is David Poeschl and I'm a parent adviser with Matrix Parents at Marin CIL. This is another in our series of monthly podcasts for the year 2024 to 2025.

Today I'd like to talk about something called Smart goals. And these are IEP goals. And they meet a specific standard. And what the acronym Smart stands for is that goals that are specific they're measurable. They're achievable. They're relevant and they're time bound. So, what I'd like to do is to read two goals to you. And by the way, these goals and other information are contained in the notes for the podcast.

So don't worry about remembering these. So. Okay. So, the first goal has to do with behavior. And we go back to our old friend John. If you've listened to previous podcasts about behavior, you'll recognize him and what John's behavior is that when a classroom his classroom teacher invites participation by students by being called on after raising their hands quietly, John will call out with an answer with a moderately loud voice or comment in five of ten opportunities without raising his hand.

Okay, so there's what John does, and that's a pretty easy thing to imagine. So, let's look at a goal. What a what a goal would look like for John. So, by one year from now in a classroom setting, when his teacher asks a class to answer a question or make a comment by being called on after raising their hands quietly, John will do so.

Four of five opportunities with 80% accuracy. Okay, so we're going to come back in a minute to see if that met the standard. But let's go to the next goal and we'll go through. We'll go through each of these after we've read them. All right. So, the next goal is an academic goal. And Marie's reading level in the area of oral reading as measured by standardized testing, is 85 words per minute.

She's in fourth grade, and her reading levels should be somewhere with within 100 to 120 words per minute at her grade level. Okay, so the goal for Marie could be by one year in a 1 to 1 setting with an assessor. Marie will read a fifth-grade passage at 100 words per minute, with accuracy and age-appropriate expression.

Four of five opportunities. All right. So, let's look to see if each goal met the standard of being a Smart goal. Or does the first one we talked about John not raising his hand in a set by one year in a classroom setting. So, it already meets the, the area about being time bound. So, we talk about being one year, by the way, goals are usually they're always written for one year.

And we'll talk about why that is and some other issues with that in another podcast but just know that goals or are written for one year. So, it's not the time bound, standard. Let's talk about is it measurable? So, what we've got is that John will raise his hand quietly doing what he's supposed to do in the classroom like the other students, and he'll do it in four of five opportunities with 80% accuracy.

Now we're going to talk about what the four of five opportunities with 80% accuracy means in a minute. But that's the standard. That's what the measure is that we want John to meet. So, it is measurable. Is it achievable? Well, right now John's not raising his hand five of ten opportunities. So, what we're asking him to do within a year is to turn that around so that four of five opportunities, there was eight out of ten opportunities.

He's going to raise his hand and he's going to do that with 80% accuracy, which again, we'll explain in a minute. So, I think that means the standard of being achievable. That seems to be something we could teach John to do within that year. Now is that relevant? It certainly is, because right now he's I'm sure having, you know, discipline issues and there's, there's all kinds of problems because of him not being able to raise his hand.

So, this is certainly relevant to his ability to be able to be successful in a general education classroom. So, it looks like we've met all of the standards. It's specific, it's measurable. It's achievable, it's relevant and it's time bound. So that would be a Smart goal. Now let's look at the goal for academics for Marie. And remember that she's a fourth grader and she's reading at 85 words per minute where she should be in the 100 to 120 words per minute range.

Okay, so the goal for Marie could be by one year in a 1 to 1 setting with an assessor. Marie will read a fifth-grade passage at 100 words per minute, with accuracy and age-appropriate expression. Four of five opportunities. All right. So, let's take a look at that. One is a time bound. Yes, it is because that's the one-year setting.

Is it measurable. It is measurable because we're asking that she read a fifth-grade passage. By the way. She'll be in fifth grade next year. So, we want to make the goal relevant to that. So, we're going to ask her to read at that fifth-grade level. So, we're asking you to read with accuracy and age-appropriate expression.

And that's pretty much the standard for reading fluency, which is what we're looking for. And she's going to do those four of five opportunities. And we'll explain that in a minute. So, I think this also meets the standard of being a smart girl okay. So, first of all, I mentioned that the 4 or 5 opportunities with 80% accuracy.

And so, what are those things mean? Well, first of all, the accuracy that John would be, which is the 80% accuracy, what would that look like in a behavior. And that's a little bit hard to define. But you know, basically if John, of those opportunities that he does raise his hand, if one of those opportunities maybe calls out at the same time, or a couple of those that there's vocalizations of some kind, that could be how you measure accuracy.

So, in a case like that, it would just be a definition that would be between the person measuring it, and the team so that everybody would know what they were talking about. Now, the four out of five opportunities, what that is called is that that's consistency. And what it means is that every time that you sit down with the child or every time you measure what this child is doing, you're measuring them based on what their accuracy is supposed to be, that that percentage of accuracy, however, they're human beings.

And so, one of those opportunities is for sure they're going to be having a bad day or they're just off. And so, what the four of five opportunities, the accuracy or the consistency means is that it recognizes that everybody's not doing 100% that they could do each time, and this allows for that. So, you see that quite often.

And by the way, in the second goal, if you notice that we only said 4 or 5 opportunities and we didn't put an accuracy on it, but the accuracy, the accuracy was actually defined within the goal. So, it was 100 words per minute with accuracy and age-appropriate expression, which is definable. So that defines it's basically 100% of that that okay.

Now let's move on to what happens next. So, these goals are written. They seem very simple by the way don't they. That what they're supposed to do is clear. What they don't say is how they're going to get there. And that's where the complexity of the goals that the goals drive the in other words, the complexity of the response to what is the teaching going to look at look like.

So, let's look, first of all at John, who is the student who doesn't raise his hand. How do we going to get him from that place where five out of ten times, he's not raising his hand to eight out of ten times that he is raising his hand? It just doesn't happen. John has been using this behavior.

And if you look at the At Our Behavior podcast, you'll know about the function of the behavior. And John is trying to get attention by this, by this, behavior. How do we meet John's attention needs so that he doesn't need to not raise his hand? Or how do we condition John so that he that he does what he's supposed to do?

And that's where the complexity comes in. So, it's not just here's what John's goals, you know, goals have measured them. There's act of teaching that takes needs to take place. There needs to be someone when John is doing what he supposed to be doing that is going, oh, John, that's great. You're doing where you're supposed to be doing.

Oh, John, here's what you're supposed to be doing. And that's the teaching side of it. So, it prompts a whole series of things. So, what I see a lot of times though, in IEPs is that these goals are written in that they are just given to a teacher, and there is some expectation of it being met by, no teaching method involved.

So, in a case like John, we probably want to have a behavior intervention plan where it would, you know, list out all those things that that go into a behavior plan and then, and have a way to measure it so that, you know, prompts a pretty complex response to a very simple goal. The next one, to Marie, which seemed even simpler, is that she's going to orally read a passage at a higher rate per minute than she's doing now.

But what has to happen at this point or what happened in in writing? The goal is that the team or the teacher writing it looked at the testing that Marie has gone through to try to determine what's going on. Why is she only able to read 85 words per minute when the average student is reading 100 to 120 words a minute, and in many cases, I won't.

I won't say, you know specifically how many. I have no idea what the percentages, but in actually several cases that I've worked on the last couple years, it has to do with something called orthographic mapping and what that means and what the effect of that is, is that that's a person's ability to be able to recognize words and to be able to read them automatically without having to decode them, or having to remember a sight word.

So, I don't know the exact number of repetitions that a person need is somewhere in the vicinity of four or 5 or 6, I believe. And so, if a person hears or sees a word and reads it, that many times, they can usually know that word automatically. And that's the reason that you can read down a page and not have to stop at every word to decode it, or to figure out what it says.

The problem with, with, with people that have orthographic mapping problems is that they don't have that ability. It's impaired, that's there to some ability or to some degree, but it's impaired. And so, when a person who has the orthographic mapping issue, when they're reading, they're having to basically decode words as they go along or to have remember the sight words that they're looking at.

So, they have to go through the process of laboriously rereading things. Now there is obviously degrees of this, but there are also specific interventions to improve those skills. And so, with this very simple goal is doing and in my mind is that it would prompt the team to look at that area of a of a reading program that addresses orthographic mapping issues.

So, you can see again how simple goals lead to, you know, pretty, you know, pretty specific and very complex responses. And just to end this one thing, I want to say that it's important that goals be written as Smart goals, because just in the fact that they can be simply written, they can be clear and concise and give a direction to a person that is implementing the goal.

Where there's no equivocation, there's no there's no vagueness about it. The reason this is important is, well, for two things. First of all, the person who's implementing the goal may not be the person who wrote it. The second thing is, if a child, for instance, moves during the year and somebody from another school or another school district is reading the school, that person or people need to be able to read something that's clear and concise again because it drives that instruction.

Well, that's it for this broadcast of this podcast. Thank you very much. We appreciate you joining us. Remember to call our helpline at (800) 578-2592 for further assistance. Our parent advisers at Matrix Parents at Marin CIL are here to help. Take care now. Bye.

� 2025 Marin Center for Independent Living (Marin CIL). Podcast author, David Poeschl, Parent Advisor at Marin CIL.