Goals
Stage: Starting Point
Goal Information
Date: February 24, 2026Attainment Scale:
Starting Point:
By the end of the semester, I will teach oral fluency strategies to increase my student's vocabulary knowledge, retention, and comprehension of key content vocabulary by 20 percent.
Midpoint:
The student will demonstrate an increase in mastery by 10%.
Target Goal:
By the end of the semester, I will teach oral fluency strategies to increase my student's vocabulary knowledge, retention, and comprehension of key content vocabulary by 20 percent.
Notes
Today we finalized Dawna’s student goal with a focus on vocabulary development for one student with a related IEP goal. Dawna still needs to complete baseline data collection and will send me that information this week.
We discussed possible instructional strategies that she might consider to achieve her reading comprehension goal stressing vocab development
- Stress Oral Fluency to reduce cognitive load on students’ working memory and ensure that comprehension of vocabulary and content information can be transferred to long-term memory, by:
a. Introducing key background vocabulary ahead of reading.
b. Complete oral reading of a grade level passage based on Lemov approach and Shanahan research
c. Pre-teach a selection of sentences in her special ed setting that will be addressed in content area reading assignments – using oral fluency development strategies
2. Sentence Fluency to understand meaning through semantics and syntax understanding including: Phrase scooping, teaching connectives, connectives and marker words (additive, temporal, causal, contrast words), and sentence combining.
We discussed how the approaches relates to Module 7 Intentional Vocabulary Instruction and would be conducted by combining instructional approaches through explicit instruction, systematic, cumulative learning and informed through ongoing assessment. We also discussed how these components of specially designed instruction fit into IEP implementation requirements, too.
Dawna also shared that one IEP meeting today took over 2 hours and she is overwhelmed by her caseload and diverse student population. Her resource support classes are so diverse that SDI is a challenge; she feels that she is letting her students down. We discussed some methods to work on SDI content and methods within her 25 minute blocks. We discussed tools that I will send her to support her approach.
She has not yet finished the Module 1 course assignments but plans to complete those and all of Module 2 prior to the next class meeting in March.