Professional Development

Today all teachers in my school system participated in some form of professional development. All of the special education teachers for the district met at our Board of Education. The behavior consultant for our district was our speaker and she presented the CAPS program-Comprehensive Autism Planning System. This program can be for not only students with Autism, but low functioning students or students with behavior. The way it works is you are given forms on the student's daily schedule and academic goals to fill out during an IEP meeting. This system helps decide what supports the student needs to be successful in the entire school environment. It is a very involved program, but with planning and implementation, you can collect great data to determine whether the student is making progress in areas such as academic, social, behavior, etc. Collecting data is so crucial now because IEP's are standard-based and data driven. I would recommend this program to all special education departments--it is very rigorous, but worth it!