Mock IEP Meeting

Last week in my Nature of Learning Disabilities class, I decided that we would have a mock IEP meeting. I remember when I graduated as a special ed major, I can’t remember ever holding an IEP meeting. Two days into my new job, I had to set up and run an IEP meeting. Oh my gosh! I thought I would faint! I wanted to at least expose my students to what an IEP meeting would look like

The great thing about my class is that I have 3 graduate students who are already teachers and I have 5 undergraduate students who have never taught.

I assigned roles to my graduate students. I took the role of the special education teacher, one of the grad students was the administrator/LRE, and the other two teachers were the general education teachers. One of my undergrads played the part of the parent.

We would work with a sample IEP for a fourth grader named Bobby Smith. I ran the meeting as if it was a real IEP meeting. We introduced ourselves and I conducted the meeting by going through each section of the IEP. The other students not in the meeting, observed the meeting. I even had everyone sign the last page of the IEP.

After the mock meeting, we discussed how it went and answered any questions that the students had. A lot of them had what-if questions such as “What if the parent asks…” These led to fabulous discussions.

I thought the lesson wen well and would definitely do this again. One of my students (a teacher) said that I should hold a meeting and show what NOT to do. Then ask students to point out the things that I did wrong or should have done differently. I thought it was a great suggestion but thought I needed to model the right way first.

Do you hold mock meetings like this? How do you conduct them? Please share.