Monday, December 19, 2011

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

No no no... not the holiday season.... ANNUAL REVIEW TIME! Just so everyone knows, I will be at all inservices where transition information is going to be discussed. If you are unable to make the inservice, all transition handouts will be available both on this website AND in the annual review cheat sheet folder.  

The most commonly asked transition question I seem to get about transition is How do I write a transition plan when the student genuinely has NO idea what they want to do post college. The answer is a fairly simple one. First,  you probably need to prod just a  little bit... find out what they DO want to do. Do they know if  they would like to be employed full time? Do they know if they plan on attending a junior college or a four year college? In most instances if students don't know exactly what they want to do, they have an idea of what they want to do. We want to be as specific as possible, so any information is better than no information.
An example of a post-secondary goal for a student who knows they want to go to school, but doesn't know what they want to study would be:

Upon graduation, John will go to a four-year university full time to pursue a four year degree.

 If the student indicates that they don't know what they would like to do when they exit high school, we should definitely write a career cruising or interest inventory goal to help them determine what they want to do. The whole purpose of a transition plan is to support the student in their post secondary goal, and that if they don't have a goal, that we are doing everything in 
our power to help them discover what their goal should be.

As we go through annual reviews, I will be posting commonly asked questions on here with answers; so check back often and see what is new in transition!