Individual Learning Plans / Individual Education Plans
As a dyslexia advocate and tier 3 interventionist, I hear quite a bit about ILPs (Individual Learning Plans – that’s what they’re called in Tasmania). Sadly, they often feature ‘early’ in the typical tales of woe that are the journeys of discovery around the intersection of learning difficulties and schooling. I qualify ‘early’ like that, in quotes, because quite often ILPs don’t actually happen until years of schooling have already elapsed.
Since going public with our journey, my wife and I routinely hear about people at different stages of theirs. The most gut wrenching are those ‘early’ on the path – they’ve finally pushed through the constant reassurances from school that “they’ll catch up” (fewer than 20% will), “it’ll click”, or “everyone learns differently” (on the whole, no they don’t), and might be waiting for an assessment (which might take a year, and perhaps another year to receive a report) to enable their difficulties to be recognised formally so that “then they’ll finally have a Learning Plan!”
ILPs seem to be the light at the end of the tunnel that many parents pin their hopes on… because they sound amazing, right? An individual learning plan! Something that is tailored to your kid, instead of trying to squish your kid into the system.
Too often, after a year goes by on an Individual Learning Plan, there’s the dawning realisation that nothing has actually changed, and the disillusionment kicks in.
Paper is cheap
In my experience, both personally and professionally, ILPs typically aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Typically… how typically? I’m yet to see one I’m genuinely impressed by.
That’s what is gut-wrenching about those encounters with parents who are pinning their hopes on ILPs as the solution.
It can actually be quite difficult to explain that ILPs are a product of a broken system, and therefore share in the brokenness. One of the ways I’ve explained it in the past is that if the awareness and rigour to implement a great ILP was bedded-in at the school, it’s highly unlikely your child would’ve reached year X without an ILP, in the first place. Or, had the awareness and rigour been there, the ILP may not have even been necessary at this point, since early intervention can be very effective.
That’s only half the explanation, though, because it’s also possible to have an ILP early in your child’s schooling, while still being ineffective. One reason for that is because ILPs are an indicator the school uses to demonstrate to funders that your child requires extra support, and therefore requires extra funding.
In other words, while it’s called an Individual Learning Plan and sounds like it’s about looking after your child as an individual, the main driver for it may actually be to secure additional funding for the school. Perhaps nothing lays this irony more bare than the practice of copying and pasting Individual Learning Plan content from one child’s to another’s.
As an infuriating aside, in Tasmania at least, there’s nothing currently in place that ties that additional funding to your child. It might be used to make a kitchen garden. Hopefully, the independent education review will address that.
What would make a good Learning Plan?
Not needing one…
The best case would be, as mentioned above, not needing one, because the school recognises, acknowledges, and acts on the problem before you do, as part of a multi-tiered system of supports. In this model, kids’ progress is monitored intensively, and those who are at risk of falling behind have escalating instructional time and resources assigned to them to stop that happening. This is actually a fairly new concept within Education, believe it or not. For decades, we have operated on more of a ‘wait to fail’ model.
But assuming we’ll still have ILPs…
ILPs should adhere to a SMART methodology for their stated goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound.
Specific
“Peter will write freely, expressing his thoughts and understanding using descriptive vocabulary.” That sounds like quite an aspirational and relevant (to literacy) goal. In some ways, it’s also specific. But it’s really only specific and specifically relevant, if Peter is currently not writing freely, not expressing his thoughts and understanding, and not using descriptive vocabulary.
I know Peter (not their real name – details shared with parental permission), and it’s true, Peter isn’t writing freely. But that’s because Peter has a spelling accuracy at the first percentile, and Peter knows he’s not able to spell well.
So, yes, this goal is actually quite a relevant and aspirational goal, but by itself it is far from satisfactory for a Learning Plan goal, because while it hangs upon the symptoms of Peter’s main issue, it states nothing specific about that main issue.
Thankfully there is another goal for Peter: “Increase Peter’s knowledge of spelling patterns and rules”.
But neither of these goals (while being worthy) are, in themselves, particularly…
Measurable
Being measurable usually goes hand-in-hand with being specific; it’s difficult to measure a goal that isn’t specific.
For Peter, making the goal of having written expression match oral expression with a nebulous outcome such as “expressing his thoughts and understanding using descriptive vocabulary” is very difficult to measure. We’d first have to assess his thoughts, understanding, and oral vocabulary, and then measure the same in written expression, and compare the two. And set a quantifiable target for that comparison.
We could, of course, do this, but it would be very resource intensive (and we have kitchen gardens to build).
It would be simpler, if we could put some numbers behind the core skill that’s causing the discrepancy: spelling. There is a stated goal to increase Peter’s “knowledge of spelling patterns and rules” which is a very relevant and specific one, but it’s not measurable as it stands and therefore it’s not actually specific… because if Peter simply learns that you don’t start an English word with two “dd”s in a row, you’ve arguably met the goal, without making any meaningful functional difference.
We can, of course, make that spelling goal measurable and meaningful. There are a number of standardised and normed spelling tests that will place a child in a percentile rank against their peers. Many structured literacy programs bundle progress monitoring with the programs, and some even include error analysis (getting closer to a why is the kid having struggles).
So it’s a relatively easy task to make such a goal measurable. E.g. “increase Peter’s spelling on the X test from Y percentile to Z percentile”.
Another rather nebulous goal, “writing freely” could at least be quantified, by stating it in a measurable way. E.g. X words per minute, using tier Y vocabulary, spelt with a binary accuracy rate of Z percent.
Attainable / Relevant
Perhaps surprisingly, many learning plan goals fail to adhere to these characteristics – especially where a SLD is involved. I suspect this is partly because they’ve also failed to be specific and measurable, and when you’re setting unmeasurable goals, it’s far easier to make them aspirational rather than realistic. On the other hand, it also seems to be quite common to set unattainable goals simply because the nature of the child’s problems isn’t well understood.
For clarity, let me state explicitly that I’m not suggesting an SLD means that meeting benchmarks shouldn’t be expected or that benchmarks are no longer relevant. I’m suggesting that schools often don’t have an understanding of the amount of work, granularity, monitoring and feedback that’s required to hit those benchmarks, and too often goals are set with inadequate details about how they’ll be met. Or, the details are given, but they’re detailing an approach that is never going to get that kid to that goal.
For example, the first strategy that Peter’s Learning Plan lists to increase his knowledge of spelling patterns and rules, is that he proofreads his own work and uses vocab lists. Peter’s particular presentation is as a very low orthographic processor. He doesn’t easily recognise correct or incorrect spellings, will choose “pear” from the options “pear, pair, pare” accompanying a picture of two shoes and, more to the point, will not be able to reliably copy words that are right in front of him. Peter simply cannot currently proofread his own work effectively, and there’s no guarantee that providing a list of words will make him able to spell that list of words.
Asking Peter to improve his knowledge of spelling patterns by proofreading his own work and comparing against a vocab list is akin to suggesting a person with severe hearing loss should work toward passing their music recital of a Vivaldi piece by copying a concert violinist by ear. It is asking him to rely on exactly the skill that is most impaired, to develop his literacy. Students with very low orthographic processing may not even be able to find a word in a dictionary to check its spelling, because they don’t know how it’s spelt.
Peter does Tier 2 intervention at school and I was shocked to discover that he’s left to mark his own work. They’re told words to spell, they spell them in their books, the teacher writes the correct spellings on the board, and the kids give themselves a tick for the correct ones, and fix the incorrect ones. Peter’s book features a swag of incorrectly spelt words which Peter has ticked as correct, because he effectively can’t see the difference in that setting. Peter is therefore not getting the error feedback which cognitive science tells us is a fundamental ingredient for learning. It’s unlikely, then, that improvement goals will be met, not because they’re unrealistic, but because the support to reach them is poorly fitted to his needs.
I have written elsewhere about how severe impairments in literacy skills can seem ‘otherworldly’ to a high literate. This is especially true if the impairments appear ‘out of place’. In Peter’s case, the school screened him as being at the 76th percentile for oral reading fluency. To then have a spelling accuracy at the 1st percentile seems strange, but this is the nature of his particular presentation.
The curse of expertise is especially strong within reading and writing instruction. As adults in education, most of us have mastered reading and writing to automaticity and it does seem as easy as speech, and imagining otherwise can be difficult. This, I’m sure, is a large part of why kids for whom it doesn’t come easily have been labelled, variously: unintelligent; lazy; or lost causes.
I’ve even heard of teachers with decades of experience declaring that they feel unprepared to teach a dyslexic child because they’ve never had a dyslexic kid in their class before – such is the level of disconnection between the expert literate and the large percentage of kids for whom reading doesn’t come easily.
I actually got a little bit excited when I walked into one of my kids’ classrooms and saw a spelling error in a vocabulary list on the wall. On one hand, not cool, but on the other, exciting to think my dyslexic child might have shared experiences with her teacher. For most teachers the possible plethora of differing presentations and their underlying deficits are not well understood, primarily because most teachers weren’t taught anything about them and it’s certainly way outside their own experience of literacy acquisition.
So, goals should be attainable and relevant, and the strategies suggested should be appropriate and relevant, based on the child’s difficulties. There’s nothing wrong with an aspirational goal, provided it’s also realistic, keeping in mind that the later in the child’s schooling it is, the more work it will take to hit that goal, because of the closing window of optimal brain plasticity.
This doesn’t mean we should necessarily expect less for our kids with difficulties. On the contrary, schools have a legal obligation to provide an education to its students that allows them to access the curriculum. So it means the longer a child is left struggling, the more it will cost the school in terms of money, resources, and sheer effort. That reality should also be driving the goals of the learning plan.
Time-bound
It’s not much point having a specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant goal unless it’s also time bound. Looking back at Peter’s goals, we should add some timeframes:
“Increase Peter’s spelling on the X test from Y percentile to Z percentile, by week W”, and “write X words per minute, using tier Y vocabulary, spelt with a binary accuracy rate of Z percent by week W”.
Preferably the date should be no more than one term away at maximum – mid-term would be better – so we don’t get to the next year and ‘discover’ the goals haven’t been met. Time is not your friend in educational remediation. It needs to be treated as the precious resource that it is.
ILPs in the future?
One good thing about these documents is that you have input into them, and you can use them to hold the school to account. In theory.
In practice, schools close ranks, school districts close ranks, the Department closes ranks. For those willing to fight against the closed ranks, though, they are still one of the best tools you have (along with anti-discrimination legislation), if they’ve been set up well.
Even if the latest review into education results in a different beast from ILPs to define the more intensive needs of some kids, the basic principles of SMART goals remain useful.