I believe this has had a transformative effect in our school: certainly it has helped us get from total dysfunction (the early grades) to feeling like his needs are being met extremely well (grade 4 was amazing, grade 5 looks to be just as stellar).
Awesome! I love to hear success stories.
You can write IEP goals that gradually target more and more classroom interaction ("will raise hand and contribute once during a class discussion, twice per day" etc.), and then teach all the constituent skills for helping him achieve this goal. There are also gadgets that help a person remember to stay on task-- look up the "motivaider." Again, all these require special ed support. It is not surprising that a person with a PDD-NOS diagnosis would need extra help in mastering these skills. I bet your son could make huge progress with the right teaching.
He has an OT IEP, but we can't seem to get it extended past the OT part. His goals include
time on task, which when measured has had completely variable results (but never as high as 50%) and always well below the rest of the class. I just don't see how OT alone is going to help with that without more tools and intervention being reenforced in the school. [Also, we had a very, very bad OT in the school (and the best OT in the area outside of school), so he was getting ineffective OT accomodations that we're in the process of changing.] He needs something else. I think you're right about more proactive goals, like raising a hand and coming up with something relevant to say in every group discussion.
which means that school and home are working together consistently
We have this for our other child, so I have hope we can get it for ds8 too, even though his issues require a little more attention to subtlety.
And thank you so much for naming the motivaider! We have had some discussion of using a system like that.
