PATHS
Promoting Alternative Thinking Styles
The PATHS program is offered at Findon Primary School from Foundation to Year 6 to promote the social and emotional development of our students.
The PATHS program helps children to:
- resolve conflicts peacefully
- handle emotions positively
- empathise
- make responsible decisions.
When students learn and use Social Emotional Learning (SEL) skills, behaviour improves and disruptions lessen.
The PATHS program is a primary school curriculum that has been shown to significantly improve children’s social and emotional skills. Social and emotional competence is a master skill that underlies both effective behaviour and academic success.
The PATHS program covers these five domains of social and emotional development:
- self-control
- emotional understanding
- positive self-esteem
- relationships
- interpersonal problem-solving skills.
The aims of PATHS are:
- To establish and reinforce basic classroom rules
- To strengthen self-control and encourage reflective thinking in the classroom
- To improve children’s communication skills with adults and peers
- To use literature to discuss and promote prosocial, responsible behaviour
- To increase children’s abilities to identify, understand, and discuss the variety of feelings people experience in their daily lives
- To enhance children’s abilities to recognise and interpret similarities and differences in the feelings, reactions, and points of view in themselves and others
- To promote the development of empathy and perspective-taking
- To help children use social problem-solving skills to prevent and/or resolve problems and conflicts in social interactions
- To support children in using these skills to improve the classroom environment and academic success.