Robin Meyers

Speaker Bio:

Robin Meyers is the principal of Lake Hills School which is the ESE Center School for the Lake County School District. Mrs. Meyers holds a M.Ed. in Educational Leadership from St. Leo University, and B.A. in English from the University of South Florida. She holds professional educator certificates in School Principal (all levels), ESE K-12, English 6-12, English 5-9, and holds endorsements in Autism Spectrum Disorders and ESOL. Mrs. Meyers has twelve years of experience in education and has held positions as a middle and high school teacher, an assistant principal for ESE, and a district level position for curriculum and accountability. She also served as the Assistant Principal at Lake Hills School three years prior to becoming Principal in the fall of 2009.

Title:

Teaching Academics to Students with Significant Cognitive Disabilities: Setting High Expectations and Getting Results!

Description:

Lake Hills School is the Center School the Lake County and serves 190 students with Significant Cognitive Disabilities including students with autism in grades PreK through 12th. For years we taught under the assumption that academics were not completely attainable or appropriate for students with significant cognitive disabilities (SwSCD). However, once we set high expectations and exposed our students to grade-level standards they learned much more than we ever anticipated. However the establishment of a system to teach SwSCD was not without challenges. Teaching academics as the focus for these students was a complete paradigm shift in our school.

Over the past few years our school has refined the process and components of teaching to SwSCD to a systems management. Academics have become the primary focus of our curriculum while life skills continue to be an essential component. Further, with students actively engaged in academic pursuits, behaviors have decreased dramatically. Overall, our students have demonstrated amazing learning gains and have shown us they were more capable than we had given them credit for.

Objectives:

1. Learn strategies to teach grade-level academics to students with significant cognitive disabilities on grade level and make progress!
2. Learn how to incorporate support services during daily instruction and monitor the implementation of those services in your lesson plans. (Support services include speech/language, assistive technology, occupational and physical therapy, vision, deaf and hard of hearing, and behavior, nursing care plans, and behavior plans).
3. Demonstrate Lake Hills’ IEP data collection program.
4. Share Lake Hills’ Reading and Math Access Points Focus Calendars and demonstrate the Access Points data collection program for progress monitoring.
5. Explain how Lesson Study is the foundation of our decision-making process.