Postsecondary education is considered as any education done beyond high school. Many students have a difficult time determining what path they want to take and what outcomes they wish to achieve after high school. Many students choose postsecondary education to prepare for a career in doing something they are interested in or love. This is their plan to make more money in the future. How can we, as teachers, prepare our students to transition into postsecondary education?
Here are some helpful resources in preparing for postsecondary education:
Next Step Video 25 minute download
This is a great video to show to your students with disabilities who are interested in pursuing postsecondary education. The five students speaking in the video are all students with disabilities who have successfully attended college. The students talk about their disabilities, tell stories from early school experiences, express their feelings on the first day of college, how to get help on campus, how to advocate for yourself, and urge one to never give up. You also get to hear some of the parental concerns these students’ parents had about sending their children to college. This video can be used as an inspirational tool as you prepare your students for success in postsecondary education.
Next Step Users Guide
This guide goes along with the Next Step video. The first section is a discussion guide that relates directly with the video where topics, definitions, and questions can be discussed in groups. The discussion guide is a great tool to use with students, parents, or a group of teachers who viewed the video. The rest of the guide is broken up into sections with the titles: secondary teachers, counselors, vocational adjustment coordinators, elementary teachers, parents, and students. The section for secondary teachers, counselors, vocational adjustment coordinators provides steps on how to prepare students for postsecondary education. Throughout this section, you can find higher education expectations for all students and for students with disabilities. The section for elementary teachers provides a guide on how to begin building foundations for higher education for students with disabilities. The next two sections are for parents and students. These sections provide useful information and tips on preparing for secondary education. This guide can be useful to anyone who has an interest in the success of the student in postsecondary education. We can use and refer to this guide as we are creating transition plans for students with disabilities.
Transition to College
This is a great website for teachers who are interested in developing a program for students with disabilities to transition into a college setting. This website explains how to build a program, how to implement the program, and how to improve the program you developed. This site explains how each program is unique and will be designed around the needs and desires of the students, the skills and experiences of its staff, and the resources it has access to which includes the college environment. This website also provides a full list of resources that are beneficial to teachers such as: recent articles and news, a needs assessment and individual support online training modules, a self-advocacy checklist, sample measurable program goals, and a sample employer partnership letter. This site is full of valuable information and tools that teachers can use to create a successful transition program.
We loved your resources the video is a useful tool for students and teachers that what to help their students start thinking about the future. We also liked the user guide; We found it interesting that the user guide included a section for Elementary teachers! That is great because it mean the resource is invested in students at an early age. The site on program development was a little hard to understand who it targets, but it had helpful "Frequently Asked Questions" about IEPs.
ReplyDeleteThe Next Step video and user guide was excellent! Listening to the five students talk about their journey was inspirational. This is a great video for students and parents to watch before beginning their Individual Transition Plan. This resource shows everyone that no matter the disability, anyone can achieve their goals. The comments from Trenell Wanker in the video, “If you limit yourself, everybody else is going to limit you” and “failure is not an option”, were amazing. The Transition to College website contains a lot of informational resources. We like how the website is easy to maneuver. In the Frequently Asked Questions section, there are additional resources and assessments to help educators learn more about transitioning their students with disabilities to college. We especially enjoyed the PERC materials and the Tips for Parents and Self-Advocacy checklist. These would be great tools to have on hand for our students and parents.
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