I attended an MDT-2 meeting for a fifth grade boy who currently had been on a behavior plan and had primarily behavior goals on his IEP. The purpose of this meeting was to present and explain the various tests that the student completed. Due to the relationship the teachers have had and currently have with the student's mother the meeting moved directly into an IEP meeting. This is not the typical process; usually the MDT-2 and IEP meetings are separate. However, the mother can, at times, be unwilling to accept the support from the school and since she seemed willing to allow the school to help her son, the team decided to proceed and get the whole process completed.
The meeting started off by talking about the student's progress since the last meeting. A discussion was held about how the student was doing across environments, in specials, in the morning classroom, in the afternoon classroom and at recess and lunch. The student had made significant progress since the last meeting and the mother responded well to the praise. The team also discussed the student's areas of strength and weakness. Areas of strength included math and socialization with peers. Areas of weakness included writing activities, writing legibly, and staying on task.
Throughout the first quarter of school, this student's teachers had expressed concern not only in the area of behavior, but also in the area of writing when taking notes and writing long assignments. The student completed a variety of tests in order to provide data to be reviewed at the meeting, in order to assist the team in selecting a label and writing IEP goals. The student completed an ability test and a cognitive test. The student's mother, morning and afternoon teachers, and the special education teacher all completed behavior checklists to evaluate the student's behavior.
It was interesting to see how the different tests are scored and presented to the parents. This student showed on his ability test and cognitive test that he has significant abilities in school. He had one low area below all the other areas, which was writing. The behavior checklists are scored and categorized into types of behavior (i.e. hyperactivity, depression, attention, etc.). I would have expected that the mom's scores would be lower than the teachers ratings based on the fact that the mother does not believe that her child has any behavior problems, he is just a typical kid who acts silly sometimes to get attention. However, the results did not come back this way. The student's mother, afternoon teacher, and the special education teacher all had similar concerns to similar degrees of severity (their scores fell into the clinically significant range). The student's morning teacher's results were significantly lower than these other three and her results did not go above the at-risk range.
As a result of the tests and the opinions of the team, some of the students goals were tweaked to better meet his needs and a goal was added to assist the student with note taking. Based on the test results the team chose a special education label for the student. This student actually qualified in two categories, other health impairment and behavior disorder. It was interesting to hear the discussion by the team as to which one to pick. One main point that they discussed was that a lot of times teachers take a OHI label more seriously than a BD label because BD labels also get a "throwing chairs" stigma attached to them. Ultimately, the team chose to leave use both labels to assist the student as he moved through elementary school and into middle school.
There are different variables to consider when approaching a MDT meeting. One main variable is how the parents are going to respond to the information. A MDT meeting is a lot of information to process due to the all the testing and results. It is incredibly critical to make sure that the parents understand all this information and understand that even if the test results are not where they would ideally have their child performing, that in the end the school and staff are their to support the child. Communication with parents is such a critical tool and finding ways to keep that communication more positive than negative is an important skill to have. In this instance, the mom was much more receptive because she was hearing positive news about her child and even though there were still deficits in the child's performance, the team made sure they kept referring to positive things the student had been doing.
One main thing I learned is to be extremely prepared when going to an MDT meeting. For example, typically MDT meetings do not turn into IEP meetings but it was to the team's advantage that they were ready to conduct the IEP meeting and discuss the goals and the IEP. It is critical to be ready to discuss all aspects of the students education and areas of strengths and weaknesses.