5 Tips for Communicating With Educational Advocates Before and During IEP Meetings

“There’s an educational advocate coming to the IEP meeting.” Believe it or not, those were some of the first words I heard minutes into my first day of being a school-based speech-language pathologist. I began working as a school-based SLP in Los Angeles five years ago. I worked in an elementary school with a large special education population. Within my first few days at the school, the administrator who ran IEP meetings told me education advocates often came to meetings and asked a lot of questions. Insights on IEP Meetings as a Parent and SLP AAC Goes to School SLPs: Ideas to Build Your Brand With Colleagues and Clients My immediate thoughts included: Did I do something wrong? What is an educational advocate? Am I getting sued or something? Looking back, I’ve learned so much on how best to work with educational advocates, and I no longer think of them as adversaries. Here are some tips I use to communicate effectively with educational advocates—and the entire IEP team. I hope they help you, too. Touch base before the meeting I reach out to the parents and the educational advocate as early as possible before the IEP meeting. Learning about their concerns helps me understand ahead of time specifically what skills they want the student to improve. This lets me set goals related to those concerns. And I don’t get big surprises in the meeting. Listen and breathe Listen to the educational advocate during the meeting. Many times, they bring up similar concerns I ...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Audiology Private Practice Schools Slider Speech-Language Pathology Professional Development Source Type: blogs