Understanding your Child's Classroom Behavior 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.

I'd like to talk about it being January, and the fact that half of the school year is over. And invariably this time of year, what happens is that every parent I speak to expresses really the disbelief that the year, first of all, is half over, and the fact that they don't feel like what they wanted to accomplish at the beginning of the year has been accomplished or is on its way to being accomplished.

And panic sets in, really, because you realize that this is another year that's gone by without you really emphasizing or feeling like you're being heard. Goals or accommodations or those things that you want for your child that you feel are going to make a real difference. So, what do we do about that? First of all, I think it's important that at the beginning of the year, you make contact with the case manager and let me just give you an idea of what's going on with the case manager at the beginning of the of the school year.

And let's say your child is in general education most of the time, and they have pull out for, you know, 60 minutes per week, let's say. So that case manager, if it's in California, their caseload limit would be 28 students in that case. And if they get a waiver, they can go to 32 students. And when I retired ten years ago, waivers were pretty rare.

I would suspect they're more common now. So, let's say we're talking about 30 students on this person's caseload. And let's say each of those students on their IEP have three goals each that are related to what that case manager does. Specifically. It could be that they're working on math goals in the resource room or working on attention and focus goals that they're consulting with.

A general ed teacher, you know, those kinds of goals where they're directly related and they need to take data on those. So, they've got 30 students, and they have an average of the, say, three of those goals that are directly related to that teacher. That's 90 goals that they have to work on. Okay. Let's start with that.

As a as a premise of what their first responsibility is, which is to make sure that those goals are implemented and at work done. Okay. Let's take a look at two of those 90 goals that this person is responsible for. The case manager is responsible for. And as I mentioned, one of them could be an attention and focus goal for a student that's in the gen ed classroom.

The other one is a math goal that's being worked on in the resource room. So first of all, the attention and focus goal with the general ed teacher. How does that work? What has to happen is that the case manager works with the general ed teacher and the accommodations that are on a child's IEP that speak to that issue and make sure that the general education teacher is doing those things.

So, for instance, there's an accommodation on the IEP that said directions repeated. And so, the case manager needs to make sure that the general ed teacher is repeating directions to that child. And how do they do that? And they have to do that by coming in and doing observations, or by having a peer educator coming in and doing observations of taking data.

So, you see, that's an organizational piece that that goes into that goal. The other goal having to do with math in the resource room, what the teacher will need to do in the case manager is probably the same person that's teaching in the resource room is that they'll need to organize a schedule that takes the children out of the classroom that they're in and takes them to the resource room at a time that's best suited for the child and is best suited for the curriculum in the general ed classroom.

And then they have to organize the curriculum within the special education classroom. And again, looking at the goal specifically to make sure that they're addressing those items. So, you get the idea of how complex this is in terms of just the sheer organization. There's a number of people involved. There's scheduling. There's keeping data. There's the teaching itself. There are all of those things that go into it.

So, it's a very, very difficult job that requires someone to have really a highly, highly developed organizational skills and the ability to communicate, the ability to be able to take data. So, it's a hard job. And so, there's 30 children, as we mentioned. Yours is one of those 30 children. There are 90 goals.

Your child has three goals. What you need to make sure to do is that the teacher knows that the goals that you have are the ones that are important to you, that you want to make sure that you're having communication with the teacher. You want to make sure that you know when problems are coming up. So, because that teacher, as I described is so busy, there's so much going on.

You need to make sure that you contact them at the beginning of the year. Try to establish a good rapport. And when I see a good rapport, it's really a matter of being respectful and following the way that the teacher would most prefer to communicate with you. As long as that communication takes place. And that's the thing that I think there were some of conflict would come up, is if your expectation of that communication is different from the teachers, and in that case, you know, that's you need to work that out.

So, the earlier you do that in the year, the better. The other thing has to do with accommodations, and you may have 2 or 3 accommodations that you feel are important for your child to have. Let's say, let's go back to that. Focus, attention and focus again, that you want to make sure that the general ed teacher is repeating those directions.

Let's say that go back to that same one. And that was a concern of yours. So again, making sure that the general, that teacher knows that that's something that you want to concentrate on and that that teacher conveys that to the general ed teacher, and that is followed up to make sure that it's happening. So, what I'm just saying in this musing is that it just makes me realize in January how important these things are at the beginning of the year and to stay on top of them, really at that, at the beginning, that beginning time.

I always call it frontloading, where you're doing all of those things at the beginning to put things in place so you're not in January and panicking. I'm not say it's not going to happen because these things just have a tendency to carry on, but at least you're much more in control by addressing these early.

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.