If you are interested in pursuing a career as a special education teacher, it is important for you to know how to write a behavioral intervention plan, or BIP. Although BIPs are more commonly written by teachers of students with emotional disabilities, you may find yourself needing to create one of these plans regardless of the student’s area of disability.

What is a BIP?

As the name implies, a behavior intervention plan is a plan that details the steps you will be taking to help modify a student’s behavior. The steps you take will be just as varied as the students you work with, as the steps you take to alter your student’s behavior will depend upon the type of troubling behaviors that are being addressed as well as the types of things that work best with the student. If the student suffers from ADHD and has difficulty focusing, for example, you may teach the student self-monitoring skills while also providing the student with some sort of reward for remaining focused for a certain period time. If the student suffers from anger problems, on the other hand, you might focus on teaching anger management skills to the student while also rewarding that student for handling a situation in a calm manner.

In addition to using different tactics for addressing the student’s behavior, the types of rewards you give while shaping that behavior will differ according to each student as well. For example, while one student may respond well to being rewarded with free time after completing a task, another student may be more responsive to receiving a material reward such as his or her favorite snack or a toy. Whatever the effective reward may be, this information should be included within the BIP in order to assist with reshaping the student’s behavior.

Why Create a BIP?

The purpose of creating a BIP is to find an effective means of changing a student’s behavior. If created properly and implemented effectively, a BIP can help extinguish a student’s negative behavior while also helping that student perform better in school.

It is important to note that a BIP is a document that can and should be changed according to the needs of the student. Since there is no guarantee that the strategies included in a BIP will work, it may be necessary to go back to the table in order to create a new BIP after the previous one is found to be ineffective. In addition, it is not uncommon for a BIP to be effective for a short period of time, but to later lose its effectiveness on a student. When this happens, you will need to get back together with the case conference committee in order to determine a new strategy to help change the student’s behavior.

In addition to being used to help improve a student’s behaviors, creating a BIP is also an important step toward removing the student from the school or otherwise changing his or her educational placement. If the student is causing such a distraction that it is detrimental to that student’s education or to the education of others, it may ultimately become necessary to place the student in an alternative educational setting. Before this can be done, however, you need to demonstrate that you have made every effort possible to help the student find success in the public school setting.