Transition Assessment

(soft music) - The transition assessment is at the heart of good transition planning. It's absolutely mandated. We must make sure that our post-school goals are derived from age-appropriate transition assessment, but I think it helps us in much more important ways than just meeting the letter of the law. If we're doing really good assessment and we're really understanding what a student's interests and strengths and their preferences and needs are, and we've done that through a rigorous process that brings in multiple perspectives, and not just rating scales, but also seeing students' hands-on experiences, it allows us to craft a plan that's much more likely to lead them to their post-school goals. Assessment often elicits kind of a groan when we talk about it, 'cause we think about it in terms of paperwork, or we think about it in terms of evaluating what a student can't do or struggles to do. That's how we typically do assessment, but in transition assessment, it's really a different endeavor. The word assessment actually comes from the Latin word which means to sit alongside, and that's what I think we're doing in transition assessment. We're sitting alongside a student, helping to create a portrait of their strengths and their needs, and then using that portrait to drive what we do. So it shouldn't be something that we think of largely as paperwork or compliance, but something that helps us shed important light on what a student might do and whether we're making progress towards those goals.