By Tim Cason, M.Ed., Senior Consultant, TNG Consulting, LLC; Vice President, NABITA
With the publication of the updated NABITA Industry Standards for Behavioral Intervention Teams, it is helpful to emphasize the connection between standards, particularly standards 6 and 8, which cover continuous team training and financial forecasting. In a later article, we’ll explore Standard 7, which relates to information sharing.
Standard 6. Team Training: Team members engage in regular, ongoing BIT training to increase confidence, build competency, and foster team development.
BITs and CARE teams must actively participate in routine training. These trainings cover professional development related to BIT and case management operations, risk and threat assessment, helping skills, intervention techniques, cultural awareness, bias mitigation, intra-team communications, and FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) compliance.
Additionally, ongoing BIT training should encompass recordkeeping, recognizing leakage, empowering a culture of reporting, relevant education and disability laws, and campus and community engagement. In addition to regular training, NABITA suggests that a BIT should engage in team-building activities. These activities foster relationship-building, trust, and effective communication, which are crucial for the BIT to collaborate more successfully. Comprehensive training ensures that the BIT can manage a wide range of matters referred to the team.
Ongoing team training encourages professional and team development, but it serves another critical function. Regular and robust training is part of the standard by which team liability is assessed in litigation. Well-trained teams, or teams operating in alignment with the best practices in which they’ve been trained, will find themselves in a much better position when explaining their decisions and actions.
Practical tip: BITs can assign monthly training topics when developing a team training template. Click these links for a sample higher education training template. As you develop a unique training template, remember that the best time to create a training schedule is not after a crisis. Planning for training should happen proactively and annually.
NABITA provides training and certification courses on these topics for higher education. Explore courses on BIT operations and more by clicking here.
Standard 8. Team Budget: The team has an established budget sufficient to meet these standards, the ongoing needs of the team, and the community it serves.
NABITA conducts a national survey every two years to track trends among BIT practitioners. Our 2022 survey revealed that the most significant weaknesses reported by respondents were a lack of time for training and a limited budget. However, team training doesn’t always have to be expensive or time-consuming. There are affordable options, such as books, journals, and self-led tabletop exercises. According to the NABITA survey, webinars were the most popular training method in 2022, with 47 percent of participants using them. In-person events and conferences are also ranked as highly preferred methods for training and development.
An annual budget can be established by allocating funds through a designated line item or shared funding across departments. Additionally, although state and federal grants are not a consistent funding source, they can provide additional support when available.
Practical tip: Consider using resources already included in your NABITA membership, like the “20-Minutes-to…Trained” video training series, whitepapers, and other resources to build your training schedule. If you have the budget, we highly recommend attending NABITA’s Annual Conference, Case Management Summit, or training and certification events.
Stay tuned for the remaining Tips of the Week in the BIT Standards refresh series.