Winter Institute Provides Staff Members With Special Education Knowledge

January 25, 2011

Close to 420 Heartland AEA staff members who provide special education services participated in a common professional learning experience to improve their skills in evaluating students for suspected disabilities and reporting on those evaluations.

The training is the result of a collaborative effort between the AEAs to provide all AEA special education practitioners with common and consistent learning experiences. This year’s trainings are focusing on the Full and Individual Evaluation (FIE) and the Educational Evaluation Report (EER).

“We always want our staff to improve their skills, and now they can be improved consistently across the state, Sarah Brown, Program Assistant, Internal Professional Development, who helped organize the training said.

The trainings conducted for Heartland staff featured a presentation by Randy Allison, former Director of Special Education at the Agency, who is now retired and is working as an independent contractor doing consulting work and assisting with trainings. He opened the training by giving an explanation of the reasons why Child Find is practiced the way it is in Iowa.

“I think it was a really great opportunity to have Randy Allison’s expertise in talking about how we do Child Find,” Brown said. “Our staff appreciated being able to hear from him.”

Participants then reviewed the FIE Implementation Checklist—the FIE being the evaluation that’s used to evaluate a child age 3 to 21 when he or she is suspected of having a disability.

“It (the FIE) is a big function for our practitioners,” Brown said. “They spend a lot of time doing these evaluations. In terms of kids, FIE and Child Find is one of the biggest decisions that our staff makes. We spend a lot of time reflecting on that decision, and spending time talking about those decisions is a great opportunity for our staff. It’s nice to take the time to reflect on that for our staff.”

Changes to the EER (the report that accompanies the evaluation) were also reviewed.

“We don’t have to use the revised report (EER) until August, but we wanted to do the training early so that workgroups can have conversations throughout the rest of the year about how does their data fall into it,” Brown said. “Discipline PAs, with their staff, will get to talk the rest of the year, which will be powerful, and will be ready for next year.”

Nikki Roorda and Mari Stirler, Heartland AEA Partnership Directors, both reported that their staff members gained valuable knowledge from the trainings.

“I thought the training was very well presented and gave great information,” Roorda said. “I had several agency staff comment on how much they enjoyed the training and how it was beneficial to their thinking about entitlement for students.”

“In conversations with my staff since the training, they shared that discussing the parts of the EER was very helpful,” Stirler said. “At least one team has made specific plans to use that information immediately in interactions with special education teachers.”

Brown also commented on how beneficial these types of opportunities are for staff to come together to learn from one another.

“Staff day-to-day don’t have a lot of interaction with other Heartland staff, so it’s essential to all of them to reflect and to learn from the expertise of their colleagues to help them grow,” Brown said. “Professional development in large group settings and in regional and workgroup settings allow us to do this."

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Heartland AEA is an intermediate education agency serving 11 counties and 136,000 students in Central Iowa. The Agency is committed every day to helping people grow, develop and learn.