School-Based OT Goals
On any given school year, I am writing 60+ IEPs. That means, I’m writing over 90 goals for the students on my caseload. When having that many students, it’s important to remember not to ‘blend’ students and use cookie-cutter goals. Each child’s IEP is INDIVIDUALIZED. The goals written should directly reflect each student’s specific needs for the school environment. So how do I go about deciding which goals to pick?
Over the years, I’ve developed my own 'flow chart’ of sorts to get to the root of a problem and address educational areas of concern.
First, look at school participation barriers. Ask yourself, “Where the child is showing dysfunction throughout the school day?” Talk to the student, teacher, paraprofessionals, school staff, parents, and anyone else who has considerable contact with the child to find out what the child is struggling with, where they don’t meet standards, when the dysfunction occurs, and what barriers are in the student’s way from participating in their educational environment.
Once you’ve found those areas of concern, It’s important to use your unique skills of activity analysis in order to identify the performance skills and client factors of concern. To refresh your memory, performance skills are observable, goal-directed actions involving motor skills, process skills, social interaction skills. Client factors are internal functions that influence the student’s performance in their occupations. They include values, beliefs, and spirituality, body functions, and body structures. Break these sections down into all of their subparts and we’ve got a LOAD of information to consider. Dust off your copy of the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework: Domain and Process- Fourth Edition, OTPF-4 for short, and check out the list of all of the performance skills and client factors Occupational Therapists observe, assess, and treat. It’s quite a lengthly list!
Now, take that list of performance skills and client factors and compare it to the school participation barriers. Can you find the threads to why the student shows difficulties in their school participation, performance, and independence throughout the school day? This is KEY for identifying which goals to write. Pull out specific educationally relevant tasks that connect the underlying area of concern WITH the school participation barrier. Those skill components or occupation-based tasks are what you’re going to work on.
You’ve got your ideas. Now what?! Take baseline data. You must know where the student is at in order to predict where the child can go in a year. Is it independently completing an entire task? Is it improving an amount of active participation? It is showing progress on components of a task? Make sure that your skilled intervention will show meaningful progress in improving this student’s access and participation in the school setting.
There you have it! The most simplistic breakdown on how to choose goals for each individual student.
Are there millions of other considerations when writing goals for students? Yes. But using this process will help the therapist to focus on what is truly impacting the student in their specific school environment at that given time.
Are you looking for more support in goal writing? Join me on Patreon for one-on-one mentoring. We can review your cases, breakdown the areas of need together, and develop client-centered goals to use on the child’s IEP. AND subscribe to my email list for some more support in goal writing coming your way! 😉
Emily is a pediatric occupational therapist providing community and home-based OT services in the Greater Philadelphia area, PA. She is a mentor for School-Based Occupational Therapists, offering one-one-one sessions to grow in confidence and skills. Emily Marie OT LLC strives to empower all to achieve their full potential.