2011 Wisconsin Transition Conference

What a crazy 5 days!  Wednesday night, I took off to Wisconsin Dells with a teacher from a neighboring school district for the Wisconsin Transition Conference.  We needed to be in town Wednesday night so we could attend the Transition Coordinator Network meeting.  This meeting was pretty informal, with a question and answer session with some people from various aspects of Transition, including a teacher, a DVR representative, someone working on post-school outcome surveys, and someone in transition. This panel was pretty interesting, but it was relatively short.

On Thursday we listened to a keynote speaker.  She was an associate professor from the University of Wisconsin Whitewater.  Her main focus was talking about the MAP approach to setting up transition plans.  She didn't go into a lot of detail, just giving an overview of what the general process was.  Anyone that wanted more information could attend her session about the MAP approach.  I contemplated going to the session, but chose to do a different one instead.

The first session I did attend was a panel of speakers discussing what they do with transition in their district.  It was interesting because the speakers were each from a different type of community: one was from a Madison high school, one from a medium sized town in central Wisconsin, and the other was from a very small, rural community in northern Wisconsin.  All of them presented fabulous ideas and it really fired me up about the rest of the conference.  The teacher from Madison was especially interesting because he took a completely different approach to transition and it was fascinating to hear him talk about it.  He treats the concept as a business: he is a salesman trying to sell a product to future employers.  He goes to area businesses and tells them what they need for their business and then tells them how he can help with that.  It was really interesting and I hope to possibly go visit his program in the future.

Unfortunately, my other sessions weren't quite as exciting as the first one was.  The next session I attended was on informal transition assessments.  I was hoping they would provide us with ideas of how to come up with them and strategies for implementing them, but the speakers basically just told us about their premade informal assessments they had made and published in a book.  I did get some good ideas from them that I can recreate, but for the most part, I kind of felt like they were trying to just sell me their book.

After that, I attended a presentation on free self advocacy curriculum.  This presentation was very interesting, but it was just very short.  I was excited to get a resource I could use though.  This is an idea I have wanted to start doing with my students since I attended last year's transition conference, but haven't figured out how to quite implement it yet.  Perhaps that will be my summer project.

The next two presentations were both on mental health.  I chose these as I am working with a student with mental health needs and wanted to be more informed on the topic.  The first session was very informational and taught me a lot about mental health in general.  I wish there would have been more about transitioning these students, but overall, very informational.

The last session was supposed to be transition strategies for students with bipolar disorder, so I was expecting to learn things I could use with my student in my classroom.  Unfortunately, it was basically an overview of what bipolar is with a minimal amount of time spent on a few transition case studies.  Again, it was informational, but it was not what I was looking for, so that was kind of a let down. 

Overall, I still really enjoyed the conference.   Both years that I have went, I have learned a lot of new information.  Not to mention all the networking and collaboration that goes on while you are there.  It's nice to be surrounded by a network of people that are interested in the same concept as you and would like to learn more, too.  Plus, it's always nice to meet up with my neighboring teacher for even closer networking and collaboration. 

I look forward to going back again next year.  Not to mention the general focus is going to be geared towards mental health needs, which is an area I don't feel quite as strong in, so I am sure it will be informational.