{"id":14,"date":"2020-03-16T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T12:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pathstraining.com\/main\/?page_id=14"},"modified":"2026-03-30T05:04:58","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T05:04:58","slug":"curriculum","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.pathstraining.com\/main\/curriculum\/","title":{"rendered":"PATHS\u00ae<\/sup> Curriculum"},"content":{"rendered":"

The PATHS\u00ae<\/sup><\/em>\u00a0Curriculum<\/h1>\n

The PATHS\u00ae<\/sup><\/em>\u00a0curriculum is a comprehensive program for promoting emotional and social competencies and reducing aggression and behavior problems in elementary school-aged children while simultaneously enhancing the educational process in the classroom. This innovative curriculum is designed to be used by educators and counselors in a multi-year, universal prevention model. Although primarily focused on the school and classroom settings, information and activities are also included for use with parents.<\/p>\n

It has become clear over the last two decades that to best achieve the educational goals we want for our students, high quality SEL needs to be at the core of the school curriculum; and science has recently explained why. Imaging and other basic research from social cognitive neuroscience has ascertained that the human brain is largely evolved for processing emotional and social information. This is the \u201cdefault\u201d mode of thinking. Moreover, the neural systems that underlie nonsocial reasoning, cognitive working memory, and what we term \u201cgeneral intelligence\u201d (i.e., those used with traditional education) are separate from the brain regions that process social reasoning, social working memory, emotions, and mentalizing, and these two systems are often at odds with one another.<\/p>\n

Historically, we have asked students to turn off their default social-emotional brain networks while at school, a difficult task at best. This makes school onerous for many children, because the brain is largely built to focus on the social world. This also results in our students utilizing only part of their brains while in the classroom. Alternatively, when we teach children through the use of both social and nonsocial neural systems, as achieved with the implementation of the PATHS\u00ae<\/em> program, learning is easier, much more enjoyable, and far more effective. In other words, using the PATHS\u00ae<\/em> curriculum, and thereby engaging both neural systems, is literally teaching the whole child.<\/p>\n

Over the past 35 years, more than 40 published research studies (by ourselves and others, both nationally and internationally) have documented the effectiveness of the PATHS\u00ae<\/em> program and show that the PATHS\u00ae<\/em> program is the best choice for achieving optimal educational success. A wide variety of results has consistently shown improvements in seven major goals of education needed for the development of healthy, happy children and future adults:<\/p>\n