Collaborative Advocacy Does Not Mean Agreeing With Everyone

When I tell people that I practice collaborative IEP advocacy, I sometimes think they hear nice.

Be agreeable. Keep the peace. Avoid disagreement. Accept the answer the team gives you.

That is not what I mean by collaborative advocacy.

Strong collaborative advocacy is about creating enough clarity for the IEP team to make better decisions for the student. Sometimes that means agreeing. Sometimes it means asking more questions. Sometimes it means very clearly saying, “I don’t agree.”

The goal isn't to eliminate disagreement. In fact, healthy IEP teams should be able to disagree. Parents, teachers, behavior analysts, related service providers, administrators, and advocates all come to the table with different training, information, and experiences.

The question is what we do with those differences.

Define the problem before debating the solution

One of the easiest ways for an IEP meeting to get stuck is for everyone to start arguing about solutions before they are even talking about the same problem.

Consider a concern like:

“He isn't making progress.”

Before deciding that a student needs a different intervention, more service hours, a new goal, or another evaluation, I want to slow that statement down.

Where isn't he making progress? What was his baseline? What does the data show? How much data do we actually have? Where did we expect him to be by now? Was the intervention implemented as planned?

Then we can ask the question that matters:

What does this information tell us we should do next?

Data shouldn't simply be used to prove that one person at the table is right. It should help us make the next decision.

Curiosity is an advocacy skill

This is one of the places where my training as a behavior analyst has heavily influenced the way I advocate.

Instead of “This isn't working,” I want to know why it isn't working.

Instead of deciding that the school team's account or the family's account is the accurate one, I want to understand why a student might be responding differently across environments.

Instead of labeling a team as difficult, I also want to pay attention to what is happening in the interaction, including my own behavior.

And when a parent raises a concern, we don't always have to rush to fix it.

Sometimes the first step is simply:

Hear it. Clarify it. Understand it. Then determine what needs to happen next.

Collaboration happens before, during, and after the meeting

A productive IEP meeting doesn't begin when everyone joins the Zoom or sits down at the table.

Parents need to understand why the team is meeting, what decisions may be made, what their concerns are, what questions they want answered, and what they are actually requesting.

During the meeting, we need to define problems, ask clear questions, notice disagreement, and keep bringing the conversation back to the student.

And afterward, we need to make sure what everyone agreed to actually made it into the document.

That entire process is advocacy.

Because collaborative advocacy isn't about being agreeable.

It's about helping a team stay in the conversation long enough to make thoughtful decisions for the student.