A New Approach to the Individualized Education Program
Pratt Institute’s Rosemary Arpino made waves recently with her senior thesis. Rosemary chose to do a theoretical redesign of the Individualized Education Program, or IEP. The IEP is a document we've referenced many times in our blog as being central to the education of special needs kids. At times, the IEP also serves as a legal document when it becomes necessary to advocate for a child's needs at trial. Rosemary's project tries to take the IEP and solve some big problems with it.
One of the biggest problems with the current IEP design is that it’s very confusing. It's supposed to be:
a document that anybody can use to find out exactly how to teach the child described in the document;
accessible and understood by both parents and teachers; and
a source of information that a lay person would understand.
Instead, it's turned into a maze of jargon and hard-to-understand metrics. There are several reasons for the sorry state of IEP design and layout. The laws that dictate IEP composition only lay out what components must comprise it, not how they’re laid out. Making matters worse, school districts often use field filling software to compose their IEPs and choose language from dropdown menus filled with hollow educational buzzwords. The result is that a person who isn't used to reading legal, educational, or medical text will struggle to discuss and understand any given IEP.
Rosemary’s redesign of the IEP focuses on bringing a higher level of functionality, empathy, and accessibility to the document. It also incorporates additional resources that serve to help the student, the parent, and the teacher. It was designed to be a document that people would actually want to use — and find easy to use.
In seeing the project and reviewing it, it made me reflect on the first time I saw an IEP. I was already used to digesting tons of badly presented information from my time in law school and as a Family Court attorney. I had reviewed thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of pages of court filings and medical records. I braced myself and expected the worst, because I had experience getting acclimated to poorly designed information delivery systems. It took me several months to get to a place where I was comfortable and fluent with the format.
The version that Rosemary has produced for her thesis is thoughtfully laid out, easy to understand, and pleasant to look at. It's really refreshing. Whether this design gets adopted or not is beside the point. I hope that it sparks a question about how an IEP should look. I think a lot of people take for granted that the status quo will always be the same. Rosemary instead asks some very important, interesting questions about how this information should be delivered — underscoring that the way information is presented has a lot to do with how much of it is absorbed.
If you'd like to see more of Rosemary's work, you can visit her website by following this link.
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