Behavior IEP goals are basically like spiders. Hear me out here. Spiders are scary. As soon as you see one, the reaction is immediate. You know that spiders are supposed to be good because they get rid of other bugs that you also don’t want crawling up your arm. But, you definitely don’t want to see spiders in your house. Behavior IEP goals are exactly the same. We don’t know what they mean. We don’t know how to track them. IEP behavior goals can make us assume that the student is going to be challenging and the paperwork will be exhausting.
So what do you do when you see a behavior goal listed for a student on your caseload? First, you need to figure out how you are going to monitor it. How is the goal written? Are you supposed to observe the goal throughout the day or just during specific times. I struggled with behavior IEP goals that require you to track throughout the entire day. If a student had a one-to-one aide or a TSS, I could ask that person to track the data for me. But let’s be honest, that only worked two times in the last eight years.
For most special ed teachers, data collection is up to us! We make adorable behavior charts with velcro pieces tied to the student’s preferred items, and then find the student lost it, hid it, or destroyed it. How can we collect data in a way that is easy for the whole team and will provide reliable records? Cue the music…
Digital Behavior IEP Goal Chart with graphs!
Let’s talk about the good stuff – Using this Google Sheets product, all of your team can have access to the student’s behavior chart from any device. You can know how gym class went without needing the student to bring a physical folder full of forms around from place to place. But wait, it gets better. Stop spending several minutes each day calculating percentages for each behavior IEP goal. Let this product do the work for you! It will automatically give you a calculation of the student’s performance across the day.
Are you ready for the best part? This product is designed to pull those percentages off each individual sheet onto a master sheet where it will actually graph the data for you! How many times have you been asked to bring a graph of the student’s behavior to show the team with less than a day’s notice? There will be no more hours wasted plotting individual data points late at night. Simply bring your laptop and pull up the Google Sheet to share.
Guide to Digital Behavior IEP Goal Chart with Graphs!
Let’s get your charts all set up so your progress monitoring can run on autopilot.
- Make a copy of the Google Sheet and label it with the student’s name.
2. Let’s update the MASTER tab. In Row 1, you will want to replace Goal #1, Goal #2, etc. with your different behavior IEP goals. You can write the entire goal in or summarize it such as writing, “raising hand.” You also need to review Row 2. “Enter 1 if student is meeting goal. Enter 0 if the student did not meet the goal.” Does this statement make sense for your situation? Do you need to explain this to teachers in a different way?
***Special note here – this product works by having a 1 or 0 in a box. The calculations for the bottom of each sheet and the graphs assume a score out of 10. Is there a way that you could make the goal fit into that format? Is there a way you could break the schedule into 10 blocks? This product will not work if you need more or less than 10 sections in a day or if you try to change the rating scale.***
3. Change the names in cells A3-A12 to match the different sections of the day
4. Tap the share button and add your colleagues’ email addresses
Now you are ready to go! All of you are able to start adding data to the chart. You will see data starting to populate on the page titled Graphs.
Helpful Hints for using this Behavior Tracking Sheet
Here are just a few hints that have saved me so much time and stress!
Do you have that teacher friend who constantly forgets to fill out the student’s behavior chart? No worries! With Google Sheets, you can insert a comment and tag someone. They will then get an email so they know they need to come back and fill something out.
Do you always lose your important documents? Add a shortcut to your Google Drive! This will make it so much easier to find each day!
You could also save it to your desktop as shown in the video below!
Need more help with progress monitoring IEP goals? Be sure to check out Digital IEP Goal Progress Monitoring Graph Template for Google Sheets
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