Higher Education

“The college years are the optimal period for students to learn and adopt healthy practices that can be a source of positive growth and personal development for a lifetime.”

Lily Ploski, THRIVE Global on Campus

Higher education institutions support all students’ success in the areas of academics and wellness.  Meeting students’ holistic needs from prevention to early intervention and recovery, TIG lays a strong foundation to help all students achieve their potential.  

Educators across the country are committed to transforming learning environments to deliver high-quality instruction through a trauma-responsive, equity-focused lens.  TIG offers the knowledge, skills, and resources that accelerate these efforts.

Core Curriculum

TIG’s comprehensive training for higher education settings is appropriate for all faculty and staff.  The innovative program model equips higher education professionals with evidence-based crisis response skills, resources, and ongoing technical support to help students cope with trauma, violence, illness, death, and grief in their campus setting. 

Prevention Modules

Experiencing loss is a universal part of being human, that impacts both students, faculty and staff in a campus setting.  Grief can impede academic and relational success in the short-term, and unresolved loss is a contributing factor in risk for substance use, suicide, and violence.  Effectively responding to loss promotes wellness, lowers risk for long-term complications, and equips individuals with internal resources that serve them across the lifespan. 

Participants will:

  • Explore how grief and loss impact student learning and behavior
  • Improve their ability to monitor for signs of concern
  • Enhance effective student-centered response plans
  • Understand best practices for addressing memorials and commemorations.

When unbuffered, stress, adversity, toxic stress, and trauma interrupts students’ academic achievement, social/emotional development, and post college readiness. All higher education staff can be equipped with the knowledge and practical skills needed that increase protective and resilience factors, improving outcomes and school success.

Participants will:

  • Develop an understanding of how stress, adversity, and trauma impacts brains, bodies, and behavior
  • Explore a trauma-responsive approach to student-centered response plans
  • Recognize aspects of compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress
  • Identify actions that support professional resilience

Achieving academic success and social-emotional development can be more difficult when a student has a health condition. To achieve the best possible educational outcomes, students with a chronic or acute health challenges need on-going, coordinated support from colleges/universities and their care team.

Participants will:

  • Deepen their knowledge of stresses that can impact an individual, family, and/or school staff related to chronic or acute health conditions
  • Understand steps and approaches that support positive adaptation and coping
  • Apply these concepts to enhance student-centered response plans

Intervention Modules

All higher education staff have a role to play in suicide prevention.  Prevention efforts begin at the universal level and with campus-wide surveillance of signs of concern and are extended through meaningful intervention, referrals, and ongoing support.  College and university faculty and staff need skills and confidence to identify and assist vulnerable students in connecting to support.

Participants will:

  • Be refreshed in protective factors, risk factors, and warning signs
  • Explore best practices for assessment and intervention
  • Apply strategies that support management of on-going student-centered response plans
  • Develop an initial understanding of suicide-safe messages

Interrupting pathways to violence require multiple prevention strategies that involve identification, intervention, safety planning, and collaborative relationships with community partners.  Implementing a proven threat assessment and management structure greatly increases the likelihood of avoiding incidences of violence, and maintaining safe, connected, and healthy campus environments.

Participants will:

  • Address college/university climate and culture as an essential component of safe and healthy campuses
  • Understand the indicators and action steps for categories of threat
  • Explore an evidence-based model of school-based threat assessment
  • Practice student-centered response planning
  • Identify steps required for implementing best practices in threat assessment and management

Recovery Modules

Traumatic response can follow experiencing events that impact higher education communities such as natural disasters, acts of violence, losses through suicide, accidents, and more. Group Crisis Response skills expand campus-based response teams’ toolkits to promote recovery.  They are integral in mitigating negative effects and monitoring individuals over time. Designated by SAMHSA as the only evidence-based crisis response model, Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) is a comprehensive, practical, integrated, systematic and multicomponent approach to responding to traumatic events.

Participants will:

  • Be equipped with a practical model of strategic planning for crisis response
  • Differentiate between responding to grief vs trauma
  • Understand three different group crisis response skills and how to conduct

TIG prepares participants to increase internal capacity to prevent, intervene and respond to incidences that impede school success.  The TIG model establishes the framework for regional Crisis Response Networks to provide support to one another in a manner that insulates responders from risk of secondary traumatic stress, increases capacity, and offers the security of trusted relationships, common language, and evidence-based skills.

Participants will:

  • Understand components of Crisis Response Networks
  • Identify roles and responsibilities 
  • Develop TIG Implementation plan to address priorities identified in the TIG experience

Beyond the Curriculum

CCSI’s TIG Team is comprised of training facilitators and support staff who are dedicated to helping individuals, colleges, and universities expand their trauma-informed care knowledge base and practice capacities. By integrating their deep mental health, resilience, and crisis response expertise, the TIG curriculum and the team-based training experience accelerate efforts across multiple-initiatives such as Trauma -Informed Practices, Social Emotional Learning, Restorative Practices, Equity, Campus Safety, and Resilience Development.

In addition to the training experience, participating schools and districts receive:

  • Technical assistance
  • TIG Identification and To-Go bags
  • Access to a curated digital library of resources, templates, and toolkits
  • Connection to other TIG districts and Crisis Response Networks