Behavior Intervention Planning

Description of the Strategy

Behavior intervention planning (BIP) is a multistep and comprehensive process integrating elements of person-centered planning and positive behavior support. BIP focuses on an individual student's behavioral needs, is function based, and relies on a team-based approach to design, implement, and evaluate intervention outcomes. The overall goal of BIP is to effect durable positive changes consistent with the target student's immediate needs and long-term goals through function-based changes of behavioral, educational, and bio-medical variables. To this end, BIP considers major and minor problem behaviors and multiple settings and engages a multidisciplinary team to ensure the development of a support plan that is technically sound, has good contextual fit, is implemented with high fidelity, and yields the desired outcomes.

Behavior intervention plans are strengths based, meaning they are developed to focus on target students' strengths, abilities, preferences, immediate goals, and a vision for their future. To design the BIP, the multidisciplinary team, consisting of the student, teachers, behavior support specialist, administrators, and the student's family and friends, convenes to identify the student's immediate and long-term goals. Once the student's strengths are clearly articulated, the team can focus on identifying the environmental variables that need to be changed so that the student can reach her or his goals.

A functional behavioral assessment (FBA), a critical element in the development of a BIP, allows the team to identify the environmental variables triggering and maintaining the problem behaviors interfering with the student's realization of goals. The hypothesis statement resulting from the FBA specifies setting events, antecedent stimuli, problem behavior, maintaining consequence, and function of the problem behavior. Based on this information, the team identifies the environmental conditions that make problem behavior more likely (setting events, e.g., lack of sleep, lack of food, conflict with parents), the specific events that trigger problem behavior (antecedents, e.g., difficult assignment, being teased, being called on by the teacher), the operational definition of the problem behavior (behavior described in observable and measurable terms), the specific consequences that maintain the problem behavior (e.g., difficult assignment is removed, peers walk away, peers laugh), and the behavioral function of the problem behavior (positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement). These clearly defined elements serve as the foundation for the BIP. An effective BIP has three core components: (1) support plan, (2) implementation plan, and (3) evaluation plan.