Major SEL & Behavior Frameworks Pre-K Programs Use Today

Picture a Pre-K classroom mid-morning. Three children are in a tense standoff at the block area. One teacher is trying to redirect, another is rocking a child who has been crying since drop-off, and circle time is supposed to start in four minutes. In moments like this, the framework on the bulletin board is no longer abstract — it is either helping or it is not.

For decades, the early childhood field has built and refined programs designed to help educators handle exactly these moments. A recent scoping review of the published literature on Pre-Kindergarten behavioral modification and social-emotional learning frameworks identified five that dominate the conversation in Pre-K classrooms today:

CASEL, Second Step, PATHS, Conscious Discipline, and PBIS [1]. Each was developed for a different purpose. Each has contributed something real to the field. And each occupies a different position in the toolkit available to teachers, curriculum developers, and administrators trying to support young children’s behavior and emotional development.

This article maps what those five frameworks are, what they offer, and how they fit into the current Pre-K landscape — without ranking them or critiquing them. Understanding what each framework brings to the table is the necessary first step before any discussion of where they fall short or what a Pre-K classroom may still need.

Why These Five Frameworks Matter for Pre-K Today

The case for using a structured social-emotional learning (SEL) or behavioral framework in Pre-K is not abstract. According to a national survey cited in the scoping review, only about 40% of Pre-K classrooms in the United States were implementing any structured social-emotional learning program at all [1][6]. That means most preschool classrooms are operating without a shared system for teaching emotional skills or responding to behavior.

The cost of that gap is high. Federal data has documented that Pre-K children are expelled at a rate roughly three times higher than children in any other grade level, with somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 publicly funded Pre-K students removed from programs every year [1][7]. Structured frameworks exist, in part, because the field has long recognized that consistent, programmatic responses to behavior reduce the kinds of discretionary decisions that lead to disproportionate disciplinary action.

For teachers, the right framework can change the texture of the day. For curriculum developers, it sets the design parameters for what a preschool SEL curriculum can actually deliver. For administrators, it shapes professional development, hiring, and the family-facing identity of the program. Knowing the major frameworks is foundational to all three roles.

A Quick Map of the Five Frameworks

The five major SEL and behavior frameworks used in Pre-K today are CASEL, which provides shared language for social-emotional learning; Second Step, a widely scaled scripted curriculum; PATHS, which focuses on emotional competence; Conscious Discipline, a teacher mindset framework; and PBIS, a tiered behavioral response system originally developed for school-wide implementation [1].

The Five Frameworks at a Glance

These five represent the bulk of the field, but not its entirety. Other approaches — mindfulness-based programs, executive function training, and co-regulation methods — also appear in the literature and are covered separately in this content series.

CASEL: The Shared Language of Social-Emotional Learning

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) is not a curriculum. It is a framework — a way of organizing what SEL is and what it should include. Its primary contribution to the field, as the scoping review notes, has been giving educators, researchers, and policymakers a shared language for social-emotional learning [1].

That shared language matters more than it might sound. Before a common model existed, programs claiming to teach SEL could mean very different things by it. CASEL’s organizing model gave the field a way to name and group the competencies that other programs could then map onto, allowing curriculum developers, school administrators, and researchers to talk about the same things using the same terms.

For Pre-K educators specifically, CASEL provides the conceptual backbone that most preschool SEL curricula are built around. When a program claims to teach social-emotional learning, it is usually working from some version of the competency model CASEL articulated. The framework itself does not tell a teacher what to do on a Tuesday morning, but it tells the field what it is collectively trying to teach [1].

Second Step: Scripted Lessons at Scale

If CASEL provides the language, Second Step is one of the most widely used curricula that puts that language into classrooms. Developed and distributed by Committee for Children, Second Step has reached tens of thousands of classrooms [1][2].

The defining feature of Second Step is its scripted lesson structure. Teachers receive prepared lessons with clear instructions, materials, and sequencing, which makes the curriculum genuinely usable for educators without specialized SEL training [1]. For a preschool SEL curriculum, that level of structure removes a significant barrier to consistent implementation — a barrier that many programs encounter when they try to deliver social-emotional content without standardized lesson materials.

The Pre-K version of Second Step focuses on early skills: emotional vocabulary, basic problem-solving, learning to take turns, and recognizing how others feel. Its appeal to administrators is straightforward. It is a research-based social-emotional learning curriculum with a track record at scale, ready for classroom use without months of professional development. Among the social emotional learning curriculums most commonly named in Pre-K planning conversations, Second Step appears consistently because it gives teachers something they can open and use.

A13 — Universal SEL Curricula

PATHS: Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies

PATHS — Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies — has a longer empirical history than most SEL programs. The foundational research by Greenberg and colleagues demonstrated measurable gains in children’s emotional competence following implementation of the PATHS curriculum [1][3].

PATHS centers on teaching children to understand and label emotions, develop self-control, and use structured problem-solving steps when conflicts or strong feelings arise. The curriculum has been studied in a range of populations and is one of the more frequently cited SEL programs in peer-reviewed research, which is part of why it appears in nearly every conversation about evidence-based SEL.

Its presence in the Pre-K landscape comes with one important caveat the scoping review surfaces: PATHS was originally designed for elementary students [1]. Programs serving 3-to-5-year-olds have adopted and adapted it, but its developmental fit for the youngest learners is a topic the next article in this series examines more carefully.

A7 — Strong but Incomplete: Where Frameworks Fall Short

Conscious Discipline: A Teacher Mindset Reframe

Conscious Discipline, developed by Becky Bailey, occupies a different position in the toolkit. It is not primarily a child-facing curriculum. It is a framework aimed at how the teacher understands and responds to behavior in the first place [1][4].

The premise is that what an adult interprets as “misbehavior” is often a child in a state of dysregulation that the adult is also, often unconsciously, contributing to. Conscious Discipline asks teachers to start by regulating themselves, building safe and connected classroom communities, and treating moments of conflict as opportunities to teach rather than punish.

For a Pre-K teacher who has spent years feeling that behavior management is a constant uphill battle, that reframe can be genuinely transformative. Many programs adopt Conscious Discipline because it speaks to the relational and emotional climate of the classroom in a way that more procedural systems do not. The investment it requires from staff is a separate question — one the scoping review takes up in detail — but its contribution to how the field thinks about adult-child behavioral dynamics is well established [1].

PBIS: A Tiered Behavioral Response Structure

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is structurally different from the four frameworks above. The others were developed primarily as SEL or classroom-management approaches. PBIS was developed as a school-wide tiered system for behavioral response [1][5].

The PBIS architecture is built around what is commonly called a Multi-Tiered System of Supports, or MTSS — a model that organizes interventions into tiers based on intensity. Tier 1 is universal, applied to all students; Tier 2 provides additional support for students who need more; Tier 3 delivers intensive, individualized intervention. This tiered structure is the major contribution PBIS has made to the field and the reason it appears in Pre-K conversations alongside curricula like Second Step and PATHS, even though it is not itself an SEL curriculum [1][5].

In elementary and secondary settings, PBIS has a substantial evidence base for reducing office discipline referrals and improving school climate. Its translation to Pre-K is more recent, and the scoping review notes that the Pre-K-specific PBIS literature is thinner than its K-12 counterpart [1]. Where PBIS shows up in preschool, it typically takes the form of school-wide expectations, positive reinforcement systems, and a referral structure for children needing more intensive support.

A14 — PBIS in Pre-K