The Pathways Curriculum

The

Pathways

Curriculum

The

The Pathways Curriculum is a new kind of social-emotional curriculum. Designed for Grades 2-12, it's based on the principles and techniques of Cognitive Behavior Therapy

Module 1

Module 2

Module3

Module4

Module 5

Self-Awareness and the Cognitive Model

Module 1 builds a foundation for the curriculum. It introduces the cognitive model and helps students understand how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors relate to each other. Through this learning, students build the self-awareness necessary to address the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives.

In this module, students learn how to:

Identify thoughts, the physical sensations of emotion, and behaviors

Analyze the relationships between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

Recognize the impact of beliefs on thoughts and behaviors

Apply the CBT model to challenges they experience by creating thought records

Understanding and Responding to Anxiety

In Module 2, students take what they learned in Module 1 about the cognitive model and apply it to anxiety. The purpose of this module is to name and define anxiety as a common experience and to explore how it comes up and how it can be addressed in everyday situations.

In this module, students learn how to:

Analyze and Identify Anxiety: Understand the causes and different types of anxiety, recognizing healthy vs. unhealthy anxiety.

Healthy vs. Unhealthy Anxiety: Differentiate between constructive and detrimental anxiety, including responses to stress and coping mechanisms.

Role of Avoidance: Explain how avoidance behaviors contribute to the escalation of anxiety.

Shift and Address Anxiety: Reframe anxious thinking patterns and use exposure techniques to reduce anxiety over time.

Self-Esteem and Emotion Regulation

In Module 3, students deepen their self-awareness by applying CBT to the other core emotions: anger and sadness. The purpose of this module is to teach students about self-esteem and mood. The lessons layer in deeper elements of the cognitive model—beliefs, rules, assumptions, and behavior—to help students understand and navigate common emotional states.

In this module, students learn how to:

Apply the cognitive model to the emotions of anger and sadness

Recognize the relationship between underlying beliefs and self-esteem

Identify and avoid thinking traps

Apply proven CBT skills, such as evidence-testing, the downward arrow technique, behavior activation, the 5-minute challenge, TIPP distress tolerance, and problem-solving through ITCH

Healthy Relationships

The purpose of Module 4 is to bring students’ awareness to the relationships in their lives and to help them make those relationships, as well as future relationships, positive and healthy. Students learn about empathy, boundaries, validation, trust and vulnerability, and assertive communication.

In this module, students learn how to:

identify the characteristics of healthy relationships

communicate assertively to address conflict

establish healthy boundaries in relationships

validate others and be vulnerable in relationships

Celebrating and Consolidating our Learning

The purpose of Module 5 is to review CBT concepts from the first four modules and to create extended opportunities for reflection and personal connection to the content. Students reflect on the aspects of the curriculum that felt most salient and useful in their own lives. To synthesize their learning, students develop, carry out, and evaluate a plan for addressing a challenge they face, using the concepts and skills they've learned. At the end of the module, students create a multimodal text that represents what they learned about their challenge, their plan to address it, and their evaluation of the plan.

In this module

Students review CBT concepts

In CBT, we begin by helping clients create a foundation of self-awareness and understanding. Once that foundation is set, they're ready to develop and try out the practical strategies that are a hallmark of the model.

And it’s proven to work. Developed by psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck in the 1960s, CBT has been scientifically researched and shown to work in over 2000 studies in the decades since.

The very same techniques that work in a clinical setting can also work in a classroom full of students. Like CBT in clinical settings, our curriculum opens with lessons that develop students’ self-awareness and emphasize trust and discovery—but with an educational twist.

How do we apply therapeutic techniques in a classroom setting? It all comes down to self-awareness, trust, and discovery.

Grounded in Learning Science

Our curriculum is shaped by the latest research on how young people learn. Lessons make use of a strategic combination of guided inquiry and direct instruction. Each one is backward designed to move students toward the learning goals of the module and the curriculum and is chock-full of the best of the best when it comes to instructional methods: multimodal representations, interleaved practice, concept spiraling, meaningful models, opportunities for unique language production, and more.

How Are Lessons Structured?
Lessons are backward designed from the lesson objectives and module goals. While they vary in structure and content, they all include:
● Invitation and Opening: invites students to recall and playfully engage with previous learning and connects to new content ● Introduction of New Ideas: explicitly defines, explains, and illustrates new concepts and skills ● Active Engagement: gives students a chance to analyze, evaluate, discuss, practice, and apply what they’re learning ● Individual Expression and Sharing: helps students make connections between what they’re learning in the lesson and their own lives and experiences
We structure lessons to suit the unique features of the concepts and skills they teach. Lessons that require a precise understanding of a concept from the beginning lead with the introduction of new ideas. But many others build understanding of new concepts through exploration, connection, and play. These lessons lead with active engagement.

At Home

Developing healthy routines and habits

Improving time management and organizational skills

Building self-care and personal hygiene practices

Establishing consistent and restful sleep patterns

With Friends

Encouraging effective communication and social skills

Building empathy and understanding personal boundaries

Practicing conflict resolution and positive interactions

Cultivating teamwork and cooperative play

In Class

Strengthening focus and concentration

Enhancing problem-solving and decision-making skills

Fostering positive and respectful classroom interactions

Building emotional regulation and coping strategies

Supported Every Step of the way

We believe that curriculum is not what happens on the page. It’s what happens in the classroom. It’s the teachers who truly bring the curriculum to life. Our team of clinicians and educators are here to support teachers as they do.

Curriculum Launch Training: We provide a one-day intensive in the foundations of CBT and four custom training modules. These modules help teachers understand the content of the curriculum (what we call intellectual prep) and practice teaching the most significant moments of the first module (what we and others call deliberate practice).

Ongoing Team Meetings: We convene collaborative teaching teams on a regular basis to review student work, identify areas to target for further support, intellectually prep upcoming lessons, and, of course, practice!

5+ years experienceAssessment: We support teachers in assessing students' learning formatively and summatively. And we support schools in evaluating the efficacy of the curriculum through well-established psychological metrics and school-wide data.

The Team
The Pathways Curriculum wouldn’t have been possible without deep collaboration between CBT clinicians and instructional experts. We’re proud of the work we’ve done to draw from the latest, most cutting-edge research from the fields of psychology and education.
See The Team

Curriculum Library:

Curriculum Framework

Scope and Sequence for each Module

Teacher Manual

All student facing materials

29 lesson plans (Modules 1-4)

9 lesson plans for Consolidating Project (Module 5)

Onboarding Meetings and Curriculum Training:

Administrative planning meetings (as needed) before the school year to facilitate the curriculum launch

6 hour ‘Foundations of Cognitive Behavior Therapy’ virtual training for educators

4.5 hours of Pathways Curriculum Orientation (3 hours self-guided and 90 minutes live zoom)

Assessment:

Research and assessment of efficacy are very important parts of our curriculum program, and therefore Pathways CBT Foundation will collaborate with your school to collect and analyze the following data pre and post modules:

Student self-assessment questionnaires

Parent Questionnaires

Student behavioral assessments

Pathways CBT Skill Questionnaire

Ongoing Support:

Weekly virtual intellectual prep/deliberate practice team meetings with one of our Pathways Curriculum experts

Additional CBT focused or Curriculum process focused consultations are available as needed (separate fee applied)