The Case Manager's Field Guide: Functional & Life Skills Settings
The Case Manager's Field Guide: Functional & Life Skills Settings
Illinois Special Education Compliance & Best Practice
For the case manager in the life skills and functional classroom — the teacher responsible for students whose education is measured in independence: a routine completed without help, a request made on a device, a job task finished at the site where it matters.
This is the companion edition to The Case Manager's Field Guide: Resource & Co-Taught Settings. The two share one spine — an eight-step case management system, the legal timelines, the craft of building relationships and running defensible meetings — because the law and the craft don't change with the population. What changes is the measurement heart of the work: this edition runs on acquisition-and-mastery data — prompt levels, task analysis, mastery criteria, and generalization — rather than rates and aimlines, because that's the data your students' progress actually lives in.
Inside:
- The complete eight-step case management system, localized for the functional setting — from first contact with families through post-meeting legal obligations
- The acquisition-and-mastery progress monitoring system: the dual-metric rule (percent-independent and prompt level, together), a research-based 0–4 prompt hierarchy, and a complete suite of data sheets — trial-by-trial, task-analytic, mastery, and generalization
- Present levels and IEP goals written from functional data, across six domains, with a sample goals bank ready to adapt
- A full transition layer: the 18-to-22 window, certificate versus diploma, guardianship and the decision-making spectrum, the PUNS/DDD/DRS linkage that funds a student's adult life, and a protocol for capturing the preferences of a student who communicates in their own mode
- Illinois-specific legal deadlines built in throughout
- Ready-to-copy forms, present-level samples, IEP goals by domain, and a meeting agenda template
Written by a practicing Illinois special education case manager and team lead with 20 years in the field, including running a self-contained Life Skills classroom — the room this edition was written from and for.
Two editions, one system. This edition serves the functional and life-skills setting; the resource edition serves the co-taught and resource classroom. Each is complete on its own — nothing in this one requires the other.