Building Blocks for Learning featured on The Hill

In her Op-Ed for The Hill, Cynthia Yung, Executive Director of The Boone Family Foundation, discusses why training teachers on social emotional intelligence may be the key to stopping school shootings rather than arming teachers with guns.

Highlighting Turnaround and the Building Blocks for Learning framework, Yung commends Turnaround’s work focusing on how relationships develop student’s skills and mindsets and ensures healthy development. An excerpt reads:

“Organizations such as Turnaround for Children work with schools in New York and Washington D.C. and have developed building blocks for learning. Using research in neuroscience and child development, they develop student skills and mindsets that prepare and support how students learn. Their Building Blocks for Learning framework is based on premise from a 2012 study that “relationships are the fuel for human development; they foster trust and relief, and are a buffer against stress and research that has demonstrated that chronic stress and adversity, often experienced by children growing up in poverty, significantly impacts the development of areas of the brain responsible for these foundational skills. As a result, many of these students do not enter school with skills for controlling impulses, focusing attention or organizing thinking in a goal-oriented fashion.”

The full Op-Ed can be found here.