Quick Access Tools for Transition Planning

Take a look at these useful tools ATS has created that can help you and the IEP team in writing the Transition Plan. These tools align with the use of High Leverage Practices and Universal Design for Learning, which is encouraged for promoting learning for ALL students. 

Transition Activities Mapping Tool (Updated June 2022) - Each goal within a student’s transition plan must include activities they will work on to help them reach their goal. Click here to find samples of activities that could help promote movement toward some of your student’s goals.

Guide for Life - To be successful, students need a strong foundation of soft skills – those intangible abilities that help people get along with others, communicate well, and make positive contributions in the workplace and beyond. The Division of Elementary and Secondary Education has identified five guiding principles that support educators, business leaders, communities, and students in their efforts to help all Arkansans develop these critical skills. The principles represent skills needed to thrive at home, school, on the job, and in the community: Growth (manage yourself). Understanding (know yourself). Interaction (build relationships). Decisions (make responsible choices), Empathy (be aware of others). The G.U.I.D.E. for Life program, with the support of Arkansas counselors and educators, is designed to give K-12 students a plan – a five-step process – that they can follow to achieve personal success.

Charting the Path to Positive Post-School Outcomes - This interactive tool covers all the components in writing a Transition Plan. Clicking on each colored box will provide more information and resources for each component, such as assessment suggestions, examples of compliant goals, activities, courses of study, writing an annual goal that relates to the student’s post school goals and when and how to coordinate services with adult agencies. Be sure to click on the title as well to find some student success stories!
 

Indicator-13 Cross Reference Tool - We recently revised this interactive checklist of eight IDEA requirements that need to be addressed on the Transition Plan. It also contains the three requirements for Arkansas. This tool will ease your mind in creating or reviewing a plan that will meet compliance. Click on each question to find the Arkansas Transition Plan forms with arrows indicating where information is needed on specific forms. Each of these components must be addressed on the Transition Plan and if any are omitted, it is considered non-compliant.

Solutions to Potential Barriers in Secondary Transition - This chart offers some possible strategies that can be used to alleviate barriers in secondary transition

 
Graphic Organizers can be a great tool to help organize information in an easy to understand format. Check out the Graphic Organizer for Student Transition Assessment Results that helps organize transition assessment information to use for writing post-secondary goals and activities within the transition plan. You might be interested in the Graphic Organizer for Transition Components of the PLAAFP as well—it helps organize information about the student and helps create a snapshot of their current levels of performance.
 
*Organizer for Student Assessment Results - This information can come from prior knowledge, observations, interviews and assessments from the individual student. The information is then placed in the appropriate boxes so the IEP team can visually see that age-appropriate transition assessments and the results have created a meaningful and compliant plan or if more transition assessments are needed to help create goals and activities for the plan. By placing information from the assessments under the strengths and needs boxes, you now have documented what assessments gave the supporting information for each goal area and what activities are needed to support that goal area.
*If you aren't sure how to use this tool, check out this video!

Organizer for Transition Components of the PLAAFP - This organizer assists in answering three questions:
1.) What are the student's strengths and needs related to Transition?
2.) How do the strengths and needs relate to the student's disability in Transition?
3.) How will/could the disability affect the student reaching their Post-Secondary goals?
 
 
Module 1 - Transition Assessments: Laying the Foundation for Positive Post-School Outcomes
 
Module 2 - Preparing for Post-School Education and Work Through Transition Assessments
 
Module 3 - Assessing for Independent Living Skills: It's not just cooking and cleaning!
 
Module 4 - Assessments for Students with Complex Needs
 
Module 5 - Using Assessment Information for Planning: Use it or lose it!