How Would You Grid This?

There is a moment in almost every professional development day I run, and I have learned to wait for it.

We are three hours in. The related service providers in the room are working with their own IEPs, their own caseloads, their own curriculum, because I stopped bringing borrowed case studies years ago. Someone raises a hand, and the question comes out in some version of this:

"Will my administrators and teachers be taught this too?"

That question is my favorite part of any session. It is the only thing in the day I cannot put on a slide.

Before I answer it, I ask them something else.

If you were a student on an IEP, how would you grid the service I am providing you right now?

There is always a pause, because people assume I am joking. Then the hands go up. C-grid.

(C-grid is pull-out service. B-grid is push-in service. A-grid is consultation, or indirect service.)

They are right. They are sitting in a separate room, away from their students, receiving instruction on a skill they are expected to use somewhere else entirely. That is a pull-out. It is the most restrictive delivery model we have. We choose it because it is the easiest to schedule, whether or not it is the best way to get adults together or students together.

Then I ask: how many of you feel confident that tomorrow you can implement everything taught today?

A few hands go up. The go-getters, comfortable trying and possibly failing. I can pick them out, and I am usually right about which ones will use it Monday.

Most hands stay down. But this is considered the "most optimal" setting.

Master's degrees, sometimes doctorates. Grouped with peers who share the same goals. No students, no interruptions, no crisis in the hallway. Expert-led, distraction-free, on district time.

Still not confident.

So I ask what would help. The answer arrives in the same order every time.

"I learn by doing. I wish I had time to practice this with actual students."

That is push-in. B-grid.

And then, almost always: "Or better yet, have you watch me and tell me how I did."

Still B-grid, now with coaching.

So I go back to their original question — will my admin and teachers learn this too — and I ask why that matters to them.

"Because I don't want to try something new if my admin or teachers aren't going to support it."

That is consultation. A-grid.

Here is where I stop and say it plainly.

I have a room of talented, driven, credentialed professionals in front of me. Without prompting, they have just told me that to genuinely change their practice they would need direct instruction, plus coaching in the real environment, plus the adults around them brought along so the new thing survives the first time they try it.

They were not motivated by the candy I brought, even if it helped. They were not motivated by turning the learning into a game. They were motivated by learning that translates into the actual work.

So why do we expect our students to feel differently?

The students with developing brains and bodies. With identified disabilities. The ones we formally documented as having difficulty generalizing on their own — and then handed a visual, taught in one room, and expected to appear in another. The ones who will not pull that visual out in class because they have never used it there and do not know whether the teacher will allow it.

We wrote the difficulty generalizing into the eligibility determination ourselves. Then we designed a delivery model that requires generalizing on your own.

Eric wrote here a few weeks ago about how the energy from a strong PD day is usually gone by November. This is the mechanism underneath that.

It is not that the day was bad or the staff were not bought in. It is that a single separate-setting session, with no practice in the real environment and no capacity built in the adults nearby, is a service model we would question on an IEP — and we keep choosing it for ourselves, and for our students, because it is the shape the schedule comes in.

Thirty minutes, twice a week, out of the room is not automatically a clinical decision. Sometimes it is a scheduling habit wearing clinical language.

If we do not have data showing that a more restrictive setting is what this student needs, the default should be service inside the classroom. Not because inclusion is a value we are supposed to say out loud. Because it is where the skill has to work.

Pull one IEP you wrote last spring. Just one, and not your hardest case.

Find the service delivery grid, and answer a single question honestly: did I choose this setting because of what the data showed about this student, or because of what the schedule allowed?

You do not have to change the IEP. You do not have to tell anyone. Just find out which one it was.

Most of us, myself included, have written both kinds — and the only way to stop defaulting is to notice when we did.

If you have asked me that question in a session, or asked it silently from the back row, I would like to hear about it. Hit reply. One line is plenty.

Rebecca