🧑‍🏫Premium Teacher Tutorial
Part One: Writing an IEP

Last month, we launched our inaugural premium post series, focusing on the integration of AI in K-12 education, particularly within special education. These posts delve into how artificial intelligence can meet unique learning needs, save teachers time, and ensure the privacy and safety of student data. Our comprehensive exploration began with the challenges of implementing Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) and the need for teacher preparation to support students with learning differences. We introduced the potential of AI to streamline lesson planning and personalize learning, showcasing practical applications like analyzing student data to craft customized lesson plans.

In our exploration, we highlighted the nascent yet growing field of AI tools to support students with learning differences. We reference UNESCO's 2023 guidance on AI in education and the US Department of Education's insights on AI's future role. Despite the lack of formal US endorsement for specific AI tools in special education, we drew on the metaphor of assistive technology as a "cognitive prosthesis" and the inspiring story of snowboarder Amy Purdy to argue that AI can serve as an augmentative aid, helping students overcome cognitive challenges and achieve success. Through discussing AI-powered tools and their classroom applications, our series aims to illuminate how AI can make education more inclusive and accessible.

Today's post gives specific tutorials to educators on how to support students with learning differences by writing their IEPs leveraging AI. 

These tutorials will fall into five distinct categories: writing an IEP, creating accommodations in the classroom, creating accommodations in your lessons, creating assessments based on IEP goals, and tracking data for an IEP.

For these pieces, we will focus on an example of an overwhelmed teacher who has multiple students with IEPs in her class. We will focus on one of her students with an IEP to emphasize how much time and energy it takes for her to create an IEP, consider accommodations in her classroom and lessons to support students with IEPs, create assessments based on student’s IEP goals, and track student progress toward their IEP goals. 

For this piece, we will only use free tools offered by OpenAI and MagicSchool Ai to help readers see that these tasks can be completed efficiently without purchasing additional tools.

Meet Ms. Shaw

Ms. Shaw, a dedicated yet frequently overwhelmed fifth-grade writing composition teacher, found herself at a crossroads. With 125 students of various writing levels spread across her five classes, the challenge of meeting each student's unique needs felt insurmountable, especially for the 20 students requiring Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Creating and managing IEPs and her regular teaching responsibilities often left her working late into the night, trying to tailor lesson plans that could cater to such a broad spectrum of needs.

She has one student in particular that she is concerned about. They are a very sweet and earnest student, though they struggle to keep up in class. They work hard to follow directions but frequently forget them, and their writing suffers. This student needs support with basic writing features like punctuation, using complete thoughts, and executive functioning to outline, draft, edit, and compose a unique piece of writing.

This student’s IEP meeting is coming up, and Ms. Shaw knows that she will have to create a section in the IEP to give this student the best shot at becoming a proficient writer.

Writing an IEP (Pre-AI Tools)

Ms. Shaw is a member of the fifth-grade IEP teams and is often asked to write sections of students’ IEPs dealing with writing composition. As the fifth-grade writing and composition instructor, her role on the IEP team is to write about the student’s present level of performance, their needs, the impact of their disability in her class, identify 3-4 measurable goals for this student, and accommodations for each student. 

As she begins drafting an IEP, she is often overwhelmed with identifying the student's present academic achievement and functional performance levels, developing measurable annual goals, and listing the necessary accommodations and modifications. For each student, she reserves a week of planning time to talk with the special education team about goals and modifications and read online about best practices for students with a specific learning disability. 

By the end of each week, she has a good outline of what she wants to share with the rest of the IEP team. Each IEP takes her about 3 hours of planning to research, draft, and complete the task of identifying goals, accommodations, and modifications for a single student.

She knows that there has to be a better way.

Subscribe to Premium for the step-by-step tutorial on how Ms. Shaw leveraged AI tools to write her IEP.

(Even if you don’t subscribe, you’ll still get free content on the latest insights in AI in K12 education from the Teacher’s AIed Team 1-2 times a week.)

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