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The Wisconsin Post High School Outcomes Survey (WPHSOS) assesses the outcomes of individuals with disabilities one year after they have exited high school. Former students are contacted for a telephone interview to assess areas independent living, participation in postsecondary education, employment, and high school IEP planning.

How can educators align transition goals with standards-based education? Addressing the individual needs of students with disabilities and successfully meeting academic standards for all students is challenging. Therefore, it is critical that innovative curricula emerge that combine standards-based academics with transition planning to facilitate access to general education, including multiple-outcome measures and learning supports (Kochhar-Bryant & Bassett, 2002). This website is all about enhancing transition outcomes by using technology. The Ohio State University developed a standards-driven computer-based curriculum for students with disabilities in grade 8-10. They emphasized 3 skills: reading competencies, information literacy skills, and career planning. This would be great for a special educator to read and adopt the standards that OSU developed. It is interesting to see what different states are doing in the field as we at times tend to stay in our own little bubbles.

"WestEd's National Center for Systemic Improvement (NCSI) helps states transform their systems to improve outcomes for infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities. NCSI provides states with technical assistance to support their school districts and local early intervention service programs in improving education results and functional outcomes for children with disabilities."

"The National Technical Assistance Center on Transition (NTACT) developed the Transition Gradebook as a school-level tool for recording individual students' transition-related activities, including the required pre-employment transition services (Pre-ETS), and various risk and protective factors associated with dropout, graduation and positive postschool outcomes. The Transition Gradebook is a locally served database application that records transition-related activities from five major areas from NTACT's Predictors of Postschool Success-specifically, Career Awareness, Work Experience, Inclusion, Student Supports, and Collaboration. It also tracks whether a student has received instruction in self-determination, social skills, life skills, and/or transportation skills. Finally, the tool also records some of the risk and protective factors associated with school completion: specifically in the areas of attendance, behavior and course performance, as well as other factors that impact school engagement and postschool outcomes."

"In this post, I am going to describe #Opensem, an Open-Pedagogy-powered First-Year Seminar (FYS) that I taught this past Fall at my small, public university in New Hampshire. While following certain parameters set by the university regarding learning outcomes and goals for the FYS program, I ran the course as an experiment in radical OpenPed. I say "radical" not because it's anything brand new or particularly edgy, but because it takes some of the basic principles of Open Pedagogy as I have been conceiving of them and puts them into practice in the fullest ways that I could imagine within the confines of my institution."

"Sponsored by NTACT, Michael Wehmeyer will identify how the Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction can be implemented in classrooms, schools and throughout a district. Also learn about a new self-determination assessment, the Self-Determination Inventory."

"Administrators, we have our eye on you with this week's FREE tool-a table full of scheduling guidelines to help you keep your ship sailing smoothly! By following these tips, you'll discover how small things like setting limits you can follow and seeking feedback from staff can help you create a schedule that works for everyone. The tool comes from CEC's "Leading the Co-teaching Dance: Leadership Strategies to Enhance Team Outcomes," a must-have for busy administrators committed to harnessing the power of co-teaching in their schools. CEC's Tool of the Week is a free resource designed to support you in your special education practice. "

"This paper presents an overview of New Hampshire's efforts to implement a pilot accountability system designed to support deeper learning for students and powerful organization change for schools and districts. The accountability pilot, referred to as Performance Assessment of Competency Education or PACE, is grounded in a competency- based educational approach designed to ensure that students have meaningful opportunities to achieve critical knowledge and skills. These opportunities are judged by the outcomes students achieve and not by inputs such as seat time. Therefore, students must achieve these competencies before moving on to the next major learning targets and/or graduating from high school. High quality performance assessments play a crucial role in the PACE system because of the need to have assessments that measure the depths of student understanding of these complex learning targets. Performance assessments are used as both summative and interim measures in the PACE system as a way to document student learning of the competencies and to support remediation or extension interventions. The paper describes the system of assessments being implemented as part of the PACE pilot as well as providing a discussion of the technical quality issues the state is working to address as part of this accountability pilot. For example, being able to produce valid and comparable annual determinations for all students each year is a considerable technical challenge as well as documenting the degree to which all students are held to the same threshold expectations (equity). The paper concludes by relating the PACE initiative to the push for deeper and more meaningful learning for students. "

"The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) is the outcome of twenty years of work in developing and, most importantly, simplifying a straightforward, rigorous process that helps all students learn how to produce their own questions, improve their questions, and strategize on how to use their questions. In the process, they develop divergent, convergent and metacognitive thinking abilities."

"Participants will understand that students with severe developmental disabilities will also need some intensive, systematic instruction to learn priority content, which can be embedded in the milieu of a general education classroom. Participants will learn what to teach as well as how to teach through systematic instruction and best practices for supporting students with severe disabilities in order to improve their outcomes. Through this CEM, participants will learn how to plan instruction to provide students with severe disabilities opportunities to learn academic content linked to state standards as well as the social, daily living, and job skills needed for life after high school."

"The Wisconsin Let's Get to Work project is a five-year, national systems change grant that will lead to improved community employment outcomes for youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities in transition."

The Lastinger Center for Learning is the brainchild of University of Florida Alumni Allen and Delores Lastinger. They saw the potential to wed cutting edge academic research and academic practice to improve education and accelerate learning. Their vision also aligned with a larger effort by the University of Florida's College of Education to generate and field innovations to improve educational outcomes in Florida and beyond.

Parents can provide a foundation for the IEP team, keeping them grounded and focused on their child's individual strengths, needs, and preferences. Parents know their child's postsecondary and career ambitions and possible support needs, and can identify particular friends, family members, or community members who can provide additional support. It is recommended that educators create a reliable alliance with parents empowering them to emerge as partners and work together to promote successful student outcomes."

Whose Future Is It Anyway? is a transition planning process emphasizing student preferences, needs and interests. The curriculum provides opportunities for students with disabilities to explore issues of self-awareness and acquire problem-solving, decision-making, goal-setting, and small-group communication skills. The outcome of this process is that students learn how to be meaningfully involved in their transition planning process. The Whose Future Is It Anyway? curriculum is based on the conviction that: 1) students who are involved in planning for their future will more likely be full participants in the planned educational activities resulting from that plan; 2) students of all abilities can learn the skills to be involved; and 3) students who believe that their voice will be heard will be more likely participate in the planning process and ongoing educational decisions."