Welcome to the Wire Differently podcast where we chat all about how to best support exceptional children.

I'm your host, Holly Blanc Moses, the mom psychologist who gets it.

Welcome, everybody. I am thrilled that Michelle Lyon Atkins is with me today.

She has a dual degree in elementary education and special education.

She received her National Board Certification in 2008 in the area of special education.

She is also certified to teach standard course of study and adapted curriculum.

She taught for 11 years as a special education teacher with grades K through four, both self-contained setting and resource setting, working on standard course of study.

In 2016, she decided to create a Lion ABC tutoring where she focuses on teaching how students learn, completely individualized.

She provides one-on-one or small group sessions for

academic or social skill needs. She also, on top of all that, is an educator and an advocate for

students in the school districts in North Carolina Triangle area. She helps parents navigate

through all the language and paperwork of special education

services. So welcome, Michelle. Hi, Holly. Thank you. I'm so glad you're here because IEPs can be a

straight up nightmare. They can be really tough, so stressful for parents and for educators too. So you are coming on today to talk to us

about five tips for developing great IEP goals. Yes. Yes, I am. I'm very excited to be here

to help out with this. I've been part of a lot of meetings, some as a teacher, some as the advocate,

and both sides are equally stressful.

Yes, definitely. So let's dive right in and talk about smart goals. What does smart goals stand for?

So you're going to see smart goals a lot of places and sometimes the words change slightly, but the S is mostly for specific. You want to have specific goals, not a broad goal. Broad

would be something like the student will improve comprehension. That's very broad. There's a lot of

areas in there that you might want to dive into rather than just comprehension.

And M is from measurable. You want to make sure goals are always having a clear, concrete way of being measured, not just the teacher said or the teacher saw, but there was actual data collected on what the teacher saw, work samples, informal assessments,

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