DARTMOUTH — Executive Director Catherine Cooper is pleased to announce that staff at the Southeastern Massachusetts Educational Collaborative, as well as faculty from SMEC’s member districts, will have the opportunity to engage in multiple impactful professional development opportunities in the coming weeks.
Dr. Peter Vermeulen
On Wednesday, March 9, participants will hear from renowned Autism Spectrum Disorder presenter Dr. Peter Vermeulen, who has worked with people with ASD and their families for more than 30 years. The author of numerous books, he has presented to public schools, colleges and universities, conferences and corporations worldwide.
Next month’s virtual webinar is entitled, “Autism and Friendship: Clarifying the challenges and the challenge of clarifying.”
The presentation will focus on autism and friendship, exploring the challenges children and young people with ASD face in making friends and keeping them, as well as how they experience friendship. It will also address practical strategies for teaching and supporting students with ASD, in particular around the area of friendship with a focus on the importance of clarifying for people with ASD the abstract, vague and context-sensitive rules and ingredients of friendship.
Dr. Vermeulen will discuss one of the biggest misunderstandings about autism, which is that autistic people lack social motivation and want to be on their own. As he points out, autistic people have a need for connectedness, just like all other human beings, however, getting connected and staying connected is quite a challenge for them. Many of the relational skills and knowledge that neurotypical people seemingly develop effortlessly and spontaneously are clogged by the way an autistic brain understands the world.
To learn more about Dr. Peter Vermeulen, click here.
Allan Blume
Also during the month of March, SMEC staff and faculty from SMEC’s member districts will have the opportunity to hear from Allan Blume, an educational consultant who works with schools across Massachusetts regarding a variety of topics in education.
Blume will be leading a virtual workshop, titled “IEP Writing Strategies/Social Emotional Goals,” on three occasions for SMEC staff to attend. The workshops will be held on March 9, 15 and 21, and will present suggestions, ideas and strategies for writing effective social-emotional goals and objectives.
Included in the workshop relative to the social-emotional focus of the IEP will be: the impact of the disability statement, accommodations/modification/specially designed instruction, determining goal focus areas, writing effective current performance levels observable and measurable goals and objectives/benchmarks, and the service delivery grid.
Models and templates will be used to guide participants with concepts they can use in their own IEP writing practice.
Participants who take the workshop will learn and immediately apply usable strategies, templates and approaches for social-emotional goals and objectives for IEP development. The overall outcome is for the use of these strategies to ease the process of IEP writing while maintaining rigorous standards and individualization.
Faculty and staff had the opportunity to take a similar course with Blume several times in January, and many praised how engaging and informative the session was. In particular, staff commented on how Blume encouraged participants to rethink what they knew about writing IEPs, modifications, accommodations and learning goals and objectives.
“I think the success of Allan’s course is that I put his ideas into my practice the next day and the next week after attending each session. I am already altering my practice in the way in which I view accommodations and modifications and the way that I write them and incorporate them into IEPs,” one staff member commented following a January session. “My entire practice has been changed and greatly improved immediately by this course.”
To learn more about Allan Blume, click here.
“These professional development opportunities will give participants a meaningful and impactful look at important areas of education that focus on inclusion and social-emotional development,” SMEC Executive Director Catherine Cooper said. “Both Peter and Allan bring decades of knowledge and experience to their presentations, and it is always so valuable for educators to engage in conversations with renown experts in their fields.”
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