Math Tips & Strategies for Students with IEPs

Students who have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) that includes a goal in the area of math need more support as well as understanding from the people in their lives that have the potential to impact their learning and progress the most: their grade level teacher, their special education teacher and their parents or caregivers.  If you fall into one of these categories, read on and make sure you are putting these practices into action.

When Your Student Has an IEP: The Basics

There is a wide and hugely diverse range of children that present with learning disabilities or need an IEP to help them succeed. Before we jump in and tackle math-specific strategies, it is valuable to take a step back and think about more broad supports. This can definitely vary from child to child, but these two basics are foundational and a good place to start:

• Your Student's IEP, or Individualized Education Plan - Yes, this should go without saying but making sure that the IEP itself contains the right goals, supports and accommodations for your student is crucial. Remember, even though these are often established at an annual meeting, they can be adjusted at any time during the year if needed. For a deep dive into the IEP process as well as a free PDF that parents can use, check out The Essential IEP Meeting Checklist: A Guide for Parents. 
• Executive Function Support - Challenges with executive function can impact a student's memory, focus, organization and time management skills - all things that directly impact their overall academic success. For students that have executive dysfunction, everyday tasks at school can quickly turn into a source of frustration and panic due to their brain literally not cooperating with them. And while kids of all learning abilities can experience executive dysfunction, it is an especially common struggle for students who face learning challenges. You can learn more about ways parents and teachers can help here: A Typical Challenge for Atypical Learners: Executive Function.

Math Strategies for Students with IEPs

Now that we've covered the basics, let's take a look at helping students with IEPs succeed in math. These 5 strategies can help reduce frustration, improve understanding, and increase overall likelihood of success in math:

1. Previewing:  New math skills and concepts can seem very intimidating to students with a learning disability when presented for the first time in the general education classroom setting.  Many times, these students may simply need further explanation and more time to process than what is allowed.  However, if the student has been exposed to the skill and vocabulary associated with it before the lesson takes place, it creates a space of familiarity for the student that has the power to crush the anxiety, panic and confusion and make way for more confidence and understanding.
2. Scaffolded Instruction:  Imagine walking into an operating room and watching a surgical procedure one time before the surgeon hands you the scalpel and says, “No you try.”  Okay, this example is extreme, but many times to a student with a disability it feels extreme when the teacher tells the class, “Now look at the practice problems on page 34 and see if you can solve them correctly by yourself.” It is important to scaffold instruction that provides teacher/parent led instruction first, followed by guided practice and then finally independent practice.  Guided practice is italicized because it is important to understand that in this step students are guided through multiple problems, step by step, with the problem-solving responsibility gradually shifting from teacher to student until the student can solve the problem independently.

3. A Clear Plan: Not all, but most students with learning disabilities can become very overwhelmed and/or distracted with math problems that require multiple steps (and let’s face it…. that is most math problems).  They need clear directions and a step-by-step plan to follow to help them confidently stay on task.  This can take the form of an easy to remember rhyme, an acronym (like PEMDAS as seen in our Order of Operations Tutorial Video), a mnemonic phrase or a plan of action like the RUN Attack Strategy for word problems. 

4. Repeated practice: That saying, “Practice makes perfect” is so popular for a reason…. it’s TRUE.  Not only practice, but repeated practice is even more crucial for students with learning disabilities to ensure that they master a skill and retain what they have learned. This means finding more practice problems on a skill than what is usually available in the textbook lesson and homework sheets.  Popular Websites such as Math-Aids.com and Math-Drills.com are great resources for finding extra practice problems.

5. Visual Representations: All of the numbers and symbols in a math problem can look like a foreign language to a student with a math disability.  Providing a visual representation can make a math problem come into focus for a student by revealing the meanings and relationships between all the numbers and symbols. The Iris Center Peabody College Vanderbilt University offers valuable insight and provides examples of commonly used effective visual representations that we think you will find extremely useful. 

Figuring out what works and what doesn't can seem like cracking open a puzzle of the ocean with 3,000 tiny little blue pieces. We hope that these tips and strategies can help you connect more and more pieces of your puzzle together and ultimately help your student be successful in math.

As a veteran special education teacher, I've made sure we created our Math Hero for Teachers and Math Hero for Parents Memberships with resources that align with these best practices.  As a Math Hero member, you will gain access to skill overviews, fact sheets, visual aids, clear plans & tactics for problem solving, examples with step-by-step guidance, extra practice worksheets and tutorial videos that are perfect for both learning and reviewing.