I was first exposed to the SETT in the early 2000s. I was taking some online AT courses and there was a section that taught about the SETT. For those that are not familiar with the SETT it stands for Student Environment Task Tool and was created by the late great Joy Zabala. It is a structured problem solving tool for teams to use in consideration of Assistive Technology and other academic needs. After I learned about the SETT I fell in love with it, honestly, you can ask those that I worked with over the last 20 years, I talk about the SETT all the time!
The SETT and using it changed my professional career. In the 20 years that I used the SETT I facilitated an average of 10 SETT meetings a year, so I have used it 200 times at least. In those years I can only think of 2 times when the IEP team did not come out in a better place than they started. Both those times, there was a single team member with a pre-determined idea of what an Assistive Technology evaluation was and would not lean into this problem solving process. Instead they wanted to look at technology first and fit it to the student instead of identifying the skill areas of the student that needed more support and then finding what tools might support them. I have said hundreds of times, I can’t evaluate for a laptop because the task (skill) has not been identified but I can evaluate a task (skill) and see if a laptop will change the ability of the student to do that task more independently. It is about identifying the need first and then working as a team to determine what supports are needed for that skill. Think of it in terms of someone going to the doctor. Your doctor does not give you a prescription for a medication without first finding out what is happening, determining what is the need and then putting something in place to help the specific need.
The reason I say that the SETT changed my career is because before the SETT I did not have an answer for “my child needs a laptop”. I could not answer yes or no because we had no information on WHY this might be a need. In this situation discussions with parents did not go well, because all they would hear is “no, the district is not going to provide a laptop”. Even if the discussion was we need more information, we had no plan for gathering that information. Once we put the SETT system in place in our district we had a plan for getting together as an IEP team to discuss the request and identify the specific needs. I also found that parents did not really want the tool as much as they wanted their child to be able to complete the task as independently as possible. Sometimes that may have been with the specific tool they requested and sometimes it was not, but ultimately we were working as a team to meet the need of the student for them to complete the tasks more independently. More times than I can count I had parents in happy tears during the meeting because they felt heard and wondered why we did not do this earlier.
When I lead a SETT meeting I add an additional column to the end with the plan for who will take care of things and when they will have it done or report back. This was always helpful so that you would not walk out of the meeting wondering what you were supposed to do and when you should have it done. Before we added this to our structure I had someone call the morning after a meeting asking for the tool that we had talked about that had to be ordered and would not be in for a few weeks. When we added this as a discussion to the meeting and noted it on the form, we had an outline of what was going to happen and when someone would anticipate to at least report back about it. That being said this is not part of an IEP meeting, so the dates are just anticipated times not something that is hard and fast. For example, if I was responsible for working with IT to obtain a tool (iPad for a communication device) I knew that it would take 1-2 weeks for me to get an iPad and the app, so I would put the date 2 weeks from the meeting that I anticipated I would have the iPad or would at least have information about when to expect it. Because it was discussed as a team and written down, I never had an issue with a parent being upset with the anticipated date and they actually reported that they liked having a written plan of action.
The SETT would also help the IEP team determine if a full evaluation was needed or were just structured tweaks to the current system needed. Only 50% of the time did the teams determine an evaluation was needed and the other times they put in place a plan for additional supports to be put in place that were already part of the classroom setting, but had not been focused on for this student. We had one time that a parent was demanding a specific tool and when we did the SETT and started identifying possible tools to support the identified tasks, the tool the parent wanted was never suggested (not even by the parent). This was because once the task (skill) was identified that the student needed support with, that particular tool did not support the growth of the task.
For more information about the SETT, I would recommend going to Joy Zabala’s website (https://www.joyzabala.com/). Under resources you will find information about the SETT as well as forms you can use. I had the honor of meeting Joy a number of times before her death in 2021. The first time I actually “met” her I was at the Closing the Gap Conference in the early 2000s and was with some friends who knew Joy. Joy came into the room, kicked off her shoes and flopped on the bed after a log day of presenting. I was pretty much in “fangirl” mode and just stood there, then when I left the room I kept saying “I met Joy Zabala, I met Joy Zabala”. I told her years later that she was my professional Elvis. When I met Joy for real people knew my admiration for her and so they made a point of introducing me to her and we got a picture. A few years later I was in a group with the Kansas Infinitec Cadre and was able to spend a day with her and even eat lunch with her. I saw her a few more times after that and we always laughed about how we had agreed to disagree about how structured you need to be when facilitating a SETT meeting. I would teach staff to be very structured in having people stay in the columns before you would go onto anther area, and Joy told me that it did not have to be that structured and that doing that would keep people from participating. I told her I just explained it up front and it did not keep people from participating in my experience and helped people stick with the process and not go rogue.
If you don’t currently use the SETT I highly recommend you check it out and give it a try. Hopefully, you will become a lover of the SETT too. Just don’t go rogue.
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