“RESPECT”, an acronym for ‘Recognizing Everyone's Strengths by Peacebuilding, Empathizing, Communicating and Trustbuilding’, addresses conflict in its relational context and has been taught to special education administrators, educators, service providers, parents and others throughout Iowa for over fourteen years. The primary goal of this program is to enhance learning for students receiving special education services by respectfully and creatively building and growing relationships between educators and family members of IEP teams. This goal is based on the theory that the power of an IEP team to produce results that will meet student, educator and family needs is rooted in the quality of the relationships among team members. Moreover, the quality of the relationships is dependent to a large extent on the way team members work collaboratively to bridge differences. An additional goal is to help IEP team members meaningfully resolve differences at the earliest possible level in order to sharply reduce the need for other dispute resolution processes, including preappeal conferences, mediations and due process hearings
Practitioner Standards & Professional Development:
Training/Professional Development:
Miscellaneous:
Public Awareness & Outreach Activities:
Availability/Accessing Services:
Materials/Activities:
Miscellaneous:
Costs to participants are minimal. There is no training fee, though sponsoring agencies often ask participants to pay the cost for meals and breaks. Participants or their agencies are responsible for their own travel expenses.