The Complete Guide to Special Education: Expert Advice on Evaluations, IEPs, and Helping Kids Succeed

Adulthood is nothing to be frightened of, even if you have LD. This guide is aimed at helping prepare you not only for academic success, but for life as an adult. It helps explain how kids get into LD programs, clarifies your legal rights and responsibilities, and covers other vital topics including assertiveness, jobs, friends, dating, self-sufficiency, and responsible citizenship.

Voices from Fatherhood is unique in focusing on fathers’ concerns in parenting their ADHD sons. It offers fathers support and encouragement and specific management techniques. In summary, this is a book that everyone — fathers, mothers, educators, and mental health professionals — will find useful in helping to understand the dynamics of modern day father-son relationships.

Today’s parents are increasingly concerned about the reading and spelling skills taught in schools and are taking charge of their children’s education. Full of ideas and suggestions — from innovative preschool exercises to techniques that older children can use to increase reading speed and comprehension — Straight Talk About Reading will instantly help any parent lay a solid foundation for their child’s formative educational years.

This practical volume is designed to help school practitioners and educators build stronger connections with families and enhance student achievement in grades K-12. Beyond simply getting parents involved in schoolwork, the book describes how positive family-school relationships can socialize and support children and adolescents as learners throughout their academic careers. Identified are key pathways by which professionals and parents can develop common goals for learning and behavior, a shared sense of accountability, better communication, and a willingness to listen to different perspectives. The focus is on assumptions, goals, attitudes, behaviors, and strategies that professionals can draw on both to assess school-home connections that are currently in place and to implement new, more productive practices. Grounded in theory and research, the book features case examples, self-reflective exercises, and discussion questions in every chapter.

This book contains everything necessary for establishing effective IEP meetings. The former President of the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education, Chuck Noe, M.A., acknowledges this and says, “Martin’s ideas work…” and he recommends this book to “anyone wanting to strengthen the quality of meetings and outcomes.” The book targets the needs of administrators, teachers, resource professionals, and parents. It is a skills-based book that will help these groups to design, review, and modify IEPs for children with special education needs.

This updated format makes COACH easier to use; it features redesigned forms; more detailed explanations; explicit instructions on “purpose,” “directions,” “materials needed,” and “helpful hints” for each step; and tabs and icons that make information easy to find. Using the established and field-tested methods of COACH, special and general educators, related services providers, and school administrators can collaborate with families and work toward developing a meaningful IEP for each student.