identifying a major challenge facing your organization at the school or district level.

Assignment:

If you really want to understand something try changing it.
—Kurt Lewin (Fullan & Quinn, 2016)

Collaborative measures have proven to be more effective when there is a shared understanding of the focus, goals, and vision. Fullan and Quinn (2016) found that coherence emerges as members of the organization recognize what needs to be done and acknowledge their part in the process, and powerful things happen. This is critical within the field of special education. As a leader in the field of special education, collaboration is vital to the successful design and implementation of individualized instruction for students with exceptionalities. In addition, special education leaders must be savvy in collecting and analyzing data for program effectiveness and student achievement. Throughout this course, you will complete a five-part Course Project in which you collaborate with a team from a special education program to determine the program’s effectiveness, including strengths and needs of the program. Based on the identified strengths and needs, you will begin to create a plan for action to implement with the program team in the future. Please note that you are only creating the plan. You are not required to implement the plan.

For this Assignment, you will complete Part 1 of your Course Project, identifying a major challenge facing your organization at the school or district level. Based on the challenge identified, you will select a system-wide program or model in which you will continue to develop and implement throughout Modules 1–5.

To prepare:

• Begin to think about a major challenge you would like to address within your school, district, or setting.
• Identify a program or model you are interested in implementing in your current special education setting to address the challenge identified.
• Review Fullan’s article, focusing on the successful models and suggestions for implementation as you consider the challenge in your current setting.

By Day 7 of Week 1

Part 1: Planning

Write a 3- to 4-page paper that includes the following:

• An analysis of the special education program that will be the focus of this project. Include the type of program, a general description of the students with exceptionalities that are served within this program, how services are provided, and the professionals who work within the program.
• Identify a group of special education stakeholders who you will invite to a meeting to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. Explain why each of the special education stakeholders invited is a key member of this team.
• Explain at least two models of program evaluation that you identified and how you will utilize ideas from the models to facilitate the discussion in order to create your plan during your team meeting.
• Create an Agenda for your meeting. Explain the agenda that you will follow as you conduct your team meeting to generate ideas to create your action plan. Include in the explanation the data that you need to collect over the next 2 weeks to be prepared for the meeting with the team of stakeholders.

**Attach your Agenda as Appendix A.

Submit your Assignment of 3–4 pages by Day 7 of Week 1.

Support you Assignment with specific references to all relevant, scholarly resources used in its preparation following APA guidelines. You are to provide a reference list for all resources, including those in the Resources for this course.