COUN 6810S is Working With Exceptional Children, a five-credit elective in the school counseling program. Walden builds it around the individualized education program: how a student is referred and found eligible, who belongs at the table, which assessments and data feed the planning, how case study students get their plans written, and where assistive technology and transition planning belong. A reader scanning your submission finds the goals before anything else. A goal nobody could measure tells them, before a word of your reasoning is read, that the paper ahead is description rather than planning.
What COUN 6810S actually grades
The graded work tracks the process itself. Referral and eligibility analyses, where you follow a student from a teacher's concern through evaluation to a determination and explain what justified it. Case study planning, where present levels, goals, services and accommodations have to be drafted from the evidence in front of you. Assessment interpretation, where scores and observations become the basis for a decision rather than a paragraph of numbers. Collaboration pieces about who contributes what. And sections on assistive technology and on transition, both of which reward practical thinking and punish catalogs.
Underneath those, the rows keep asking one question: can the reader trace every element back to data? An annual goal should be answerable with the phrase because the evaluation showed, and if it cannot be, it was chosen for plausibility rather than evidence. The same test applies to a service minute count, an accommodation, a placement recommendation and a piece of equipment. Papers that read as sensible but arrive at their conclusions from nowhere score in the middle of every row simultaneously, which is a frustrating way to lose a grade.
There is a family thread as well. Parents and caregivers are team members with decision rights, not people to be informed after the professionals have agreed, and assignments regularly test whether you write as though that is true. A plan that mentions family engagement once and then describes a meeting in which nobody outside the school says anything has answered the row on paper and missed it in substance.
How we help in this course
Send the case study, the assignment page and the scoring guide. What comes back reads like planning documentation rather than an essay about disability: present levels written from the actual evidence, goals with their conditions and criteria attached, services and accommodations justified one at a time, and a collaboration section that gives each team member something real to contribute.
Turnround sits at 24 to 48 hours. The goal on every file is an A, the delivery note tells you where each rubric row was answered, two reviewers see the work before you do, and further passes cost nothing.
Weekly manuals for this course
COUN 6810S does not have per-week manuals on this site at present. They get added as individual weeks are confirmed, since guessing a schedule from a course description helps nobody. Until the week you need appears, chat is the fastest route to an answer about scope and turnaround.
Case study IEP due and the goals not written?
Send the case and the rubric together. The first sample is on us.
The thirty-second read: can the goal be measured?
Skim your own draft the way it will be skimmed. Find the goals, cover the rest of the page, and ask whether a substitute teacher could collect data on them next Tuesday without asking you a single question. If the answer is no, fix that before you polish anything else, because the goal row usually anchors the whole scoring guide and several other rows depend on it being solid.
The repair is mechanical. A workable goal carries four parts: the conditions under which the skill is performed, the learner, the observable behavior, and the criterion that says how well and how often. Students improve social skills fails all four. Given a structured lunch group twice weekly, the student will initiate a conversation with a peer on four of five observed occasions across three consecutive weeks passes all four, and it also tells the team exactly what data to bring to the review. Write the measurement clause first, then work backwards into the sentence.
Who is at the table, and what each person actually contributes
Assignments in this course keep returning to team composition because it is where classroom practice and paperwork meet. A general education teacher brings what the student does in the room where the curriculum lives. A special educator brings the specially designed instruction. Someone able to interpret evaluation results explains what the testing means rather than what it says. An administrator can commit resources. Related service providers speak to communication, movement, vision, hearing or mental health needs. The parent or caregiver brings the child outside school hours, which nobody else in the room has seen.
Write each of those contributions as a distinct voice with a distinct kind of knowledge, and the collaboration rows take care of themselves. Where a school counselor appears, be careful about the role. Counselors contribute observation, social and emotional data, group and individual support, transition input and family communication, and in some buildings they coordinate meetings. Claiming duties that belong to a case manager or an evaluator is a small error that reads as unfamiliarity with how the process runs.
Terms, deadlines and the vocabulary problem
Whether your term is a quarter or a semester is decided by the program you enrolled in, and the authoritative dates sit in your student portal. Deadlines fall at 10:59 p.m. Central, and therefore 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Walden also expects an assignment or a discussion post inside the opening week before attendance is treated as established.
Budget time for vocabulary in the early weeks. Special education has a large set of terms that look interchangeable and are not: accommodation against modification, eligibility against diagnosis, evaluation against assessment, service against support, and placement described as a continuum rather than a room. Federal special education law sets the frame and each state adds its own procedures and timelines on top, so where an assignment asks about process specifics, check your state's own guidance rather than assuming the practice you saw in one district applies everywhere. Getting the words right early saves points on every later paper, because a grader reading precise terminology stops checking whether you understand the system.
How to actually write COUN 6810S: where to begin
Begin inside the case, not inside the literature. Read the case study twice with a pen, and pull out three lists as you go: what the student can do, what the student cannot yet do, and what the setting is doing to help or hinder. Nearly every rubric row in this course can be answered from those three lists, and the writing gets much faster once they exist, because present levels come from the first two and services come from the third.
Then map the rubric rows onto headings, note the weights, and check for the row people miss. In this course it is usually either the family and collaboration row or the evaluation row, both of which sit late in the document and both of which get written at speed by tired people. Give them a proper allocation of words up front and you gain marks that most of the class leaves on the table.
Draft the plan in the order the process moves. Referral concern, then what was evaluated and what it found, then present levels written in observable terms, then goals derived from the gaps in those present levels, then the services and accommodations that make the goals reachable, then the setting decision with its reasoning, then how progress will be monitored and reported. Each element should point back at the one before it. Where a reader has to ask why a service appeared, the chain broke somewhere earlier.
Argue for the setting rather than asserting it. Educational placement is meant to be decided after goals and services, not before, and the reasoning has to show why the supports could not be delivered in a less separate environment. A paper that names a self-contained placement in its opening paragraph and justifies it afterwards has inverted the logic the field uses, and experienced graders read that inversion instantly. Say what was tried, what it would take to make the general setting work, and what tipped the decision.
Synthesis in this subject means treating intervention research as conditional. A strategy validated with elementary students who have reading disabilities may not transfer to an adolescent with a different profile, and saying so, with the difference named, is exactly the judgment the rubric wants. Where you propose an evidence-based practice, state the population it was studied with, then state how closely your case study student matches it. When the match is loose, say what you would monitor to catch the mismatch early. That single move separates a graduate paper from a summary of a website.
| Section | What it does | Where it usually fails |
|---|---|---|
| Referral and eligibility | Tracks the concern from the classroom into evaluation and explains what supported the determination. | A diagnosis reported as though it settles eligibility, with the educational impact never established. |
| Present levels | Describes current performance in observable terms, strengths included, using data from the case. | A paragraph of deficit language with no baseline anybody could measure against later. |
| Annual goals | Turns each identified gap into a statement with conditions, behavior and criteria. | Goals written as activities the adults will do rather than as skills the student will show. |
| Services and accommodations | Specifies what is provided, by whom, how often, and what changes about access rather than expectation. | Accommodation and modification used interchangeably, so the standard quietly moves without anyone saying so. |
| Assistive technology | Matches a tool to a task the student cannot currently complete, with training and support named. | A list of devices with no task attached, and nobody responsible for teaching their use. |
| Transition planning | Connects post-school goals to the instruction, experiences and agency links that would make them reachable. | A career named in one line, with no course of study, no skills and no agency contact behind it. |
| Family and team | Gives each member a contribution and shows the caregiver influencing a decision. | Family engagement asserted, then a meeting described in which only school staff speak. |
Threads about a student who is not in the room
Discussion prompts here tend to hand you a scenario and ask what you would do, or ask you to take a position on an area where practice and law rub against each other. Post something a classmate could disagree with. Name the data you would want, say what decision it would inform, and be explicit about the point at which you would change your mind. Vagueness is especially cheap in this subject because everyone can agree that children deserve support, and agreement earns nothing.
Walden asks for participation that is substantive and spread through the week, recommending activity across at least two to four days rather than a single session, and it says openly that requirements vary by course and sometimes by week, so your classroom instructions are the ones that count. On replies, the useful contributions are concrete: point out that a classmate's goal has no criterion, ask which team member would deliver the support they described, or raise the family perspective that would complicate their plan. Every one of those helps the other person more than agreement does, and rubrics score it higher.
Law, evaluation reports and APA 7
Sources in this course come in three layers. Statute and regulation, which are cited to the law or the code section and are the right authority for procedural claims. State and district guidance, cited to the agency with its year, which is where practical timelines and forms live. And peer-reviewed research, which is where claims about what works belong. Mixing those up is the commonest citation error here: a journal article is not authority for a legal requirement, and a state handbook is not evidence that an intervention is effective.
Use the Walden Library for the research layer, since special education and school psychology journals sit in databases a general search will not cover properly. On language, follow person-first conventions unless the individual or community you are writing about prefers otherwise, and be consistent throughout the document, because inconsistent usage reads as carelessness in a field where the words carry weight. Formatting, headings and reference entries follow the Walden Writing Center's templates, which is the fastest way to keep that part of the feedback empty.
The mistakes that cost points in COUN 6810S
- Goals stated as adult activities, so nobody could ever collect data showing whether the student improved.
- Accommodation and modification treated as synonyms, which quietly changes what the student is being held to.
- Evaluation results reported at length and then never used to justify a single goal or service.
- Placement chosen first and defended afterwards, reversing the order the process is built on.
- Assistive technology presented as a shopping list, with no task, no training and no person responsible.
- Transition sections that name an occupation without a course of study, work experience or agency connection.
- Deficit-only descriptions of a child, with strengths absent, which no team would accept in a real meeting.
COUN 6810S questions students actually ask
I am not a special education teacher. Can I still write these assignments?
Yes, and the course is designed on that assumption. It sits in the school counseling program as an elective rather than in a special education degree, and the case studies supply the classroom detail you would otherwise lack. What you do need is fluency with the paperwork and the process, because that is the language a team meeting runs on. Learn the sequence from referral through evaluation, eligibility, goal setting and review, learn what each team member contributes, and learn to read an evaluation report well enough to pull out the two or three findings a goal should be built on. None of that requires a special education license, and all of it is graded.
How specific does an IEP goal have to be?
Specific enough that two people watching the same student would score it identically. That means a named behavior or skill, the conditions it happens under, the level that counts as success, and how often it has to occur before you call it met. Reading fluency will improve is not a goal, because nobody can say when it has happened. Given a passage at second grade level, the student will read aloud at seventy words per minute with three or fewer errors on four of five trials is a goal, because the data collection is already implied by the wording. Write the measurement first and the rest of the sentence usually assembles itself.
Can I use a real student from my school?
Only with real care, and usually the case study is the safer route. Student records are protected, and a course paper is not a secure setting for them. If your assignment invites you to draw on practice, strip everything identifying before you write a word: no name, no school, no date of birth, no distinctive combination of details that would let a colleague recognize the child. Describe the pattern of need rather than the person carrying it. Where the assignment supplies its own case, use it, because the details in it were chosen to make particular rubric rows reachable.