CBT 2.0 Curriculum and User's Manual

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), a framework that takes a practical approach to solving problems, has demonstrated value for helping young people with involvement in the justice system slow down their thinking processes and make more deliberative decisions. These free resources - a curriculum developed by ideas42 and the University of Chicago Crime Lab based on introduction of CBT to the youth at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) in Chicago, Illinois, United States, as well as an accompanying user's manual - combine the elements of CBT that have been found to effective in helping youth manage their own decision-making with hands-on delivery strategies. They guide young participants to slow down their thinking processes, consider what biases may be built into their responses, and shift their decision-making strategies in certain contexts toward more reflective ones.

The goal of the exercises outlined in these resources is to help youth recognise the role of automatic behaviour in their lives and help them behave less mechanically, question their initial perceptions of a situation, and consider the consequences of different ways of responding. From a public policy and a practitioner perspective, helping youth with this type of situational awareness and ensuring they deploy an appropriate response is important for those situations that often lead youth to engage in behaviours that harm themselves or others. For that reason, the exercises in the curriculum might have the greatest impact if they focus specifically on:

• dealing with conflict and escalation of altercations (central to so many violent events)
• classroom behaviour (central to succeeding in school, which a large body of research in social science suggests is the flip side of the criminal-behaviour coin).

The lessons help youth identify their attitudes and beliefs and understand how those can in turn shape their automatic responses in low- and high-stake situations. For example, one lesson that helps young people recognise their thinking patterns teaches "self-talk". While people tend to believe they see things as they are and then tell themselves how to respond, instead people play a role in constructing the reality they see. That is, CBT teaches people that they have a choice in how they interpret situations, and also a choice in their own responses, particularly in high-risk scenarios. Another tool that helps youth think about the role they play in interpreting the world is the "camera view" technique. It poses the question, "What would a camera see?" as a framework for helping young people step back and view a situation from a different perspective. This provides an opportunity to reflect on how their thoughts are connected to their responses, helping young people remove bias from their thinking and consider another perspective before acting.

The user's manual includes insights about effective and engaging delivery of the curriculum based on conversations with JTDC staff and implementers of other evidence-based CBT curricula. Staff members were found to not only emphasise the curriculum's key elements when working with youth in their CBT groups, but also to extend the same lens outside group sessions, using it in all their daily interactions with the young people in their care. They made it a point to talk to the young people about the big and the small decisions they were making every day and show them how to look at situations through the lens of CBT. In addition, the staff repeatedly mentioned that they often improvise and pick and choose specific elements from the curricular materials, adapting themes to real-life situations youths in their group had encountered. In a sense, what they delivered was based on the curriculum, but was not a rote implementation of it.

The curriculum was tested and found to be effective with justice-system-involved youth hailing from some of the most disadvantaged and dangerous neighbourhoods in the city of Chicago. However, the user's manual also provides guidance to other practitioners and policymakers working with different populations (not youth in juvenile detention), so that they might have a better sense for how to identify promising CBT programmes and strengthen the way such programmes are delivered.