Tools for Educators

Turnaround produces research-based tools that build environments, skills and mindsets to accelerate healthy student development and academic achievement.

Educators across the country are looking for ways to better support their students’ cognitive, social and emotional development. Over the past 16 years, Turnaround has partnered with more than 100 schools. We have learned a lot from our work in classrooms and from scientific research on stress and brain development. Now we want to share what we’ve learned.

Turnaround’s offers two types of tools:

1. Knowledge tools
2. Practice tools

Building Blocks for Learning

Turnaround for Children’s Building Blocks for Learning is an example of a knowledge tool designed to build awareness, deepen understanding and inspire others to address the impact of adversity on learning and behavior. This framework describes how children acquire the skills and mindsets they need to succeed in school and beyond. Each element represents a set of evidence-based skills and mindsets that have been proven by research to strongly correlate to, and even predict, academic achievement. The framework draws from research in multiple fields to suggest movement from lower-order to higher-order skills. Overall, it provides a rigorous perspective on what it means to intentionally teach the whole child – to develop the social, emotional, motivational and cognitive skills in every learner. Turnaround offers this framework as a contribution to a vital collaborative endeavor to deepen and transform K-12 education.

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Practice Tools

Turnaround’s practice tools are research-based strategies designed to achieve a specific outcome for students or schools. They come with clear guidance to help school system leaders and practitioners implement them. These tools focus on three specific areas:

• Environment – tools that build the capacities of a Multi-Tiered System of Supports, targeting physical safety, emotional support and strong relationships to build calm, safe and predictable climates for learning
• Skills – tools that develop self-regulation, stress management, and relationship skills that enable students to regulate themselves, relate to others, control their behavior and become active participants in a classroom community
• Mindsets – tools that develop growth mindset, sense of belonging, and sense of purpose that inform students’ beliefs about self and school

All of Turnaround’s tools are grounded in the science of learning and development. Some, such as establishing an effective student support system, are based on what we have found works well in schools. Others are being developed via partnerships and focus on articulating how strategies can be modified, adapted and successfully implemented in schools serving diverse populations of students.

When you have 29 children sitting in front of you who have emotional needs, who have family issues, who have more problems than an adult could handle, and you’re trying to get them to want to learn, that is an extreme challenge that I don’t think many teachers are prepared to take on.

– Edel Carolan, P.S. 85 Great Expectations, Bronx, NY