Turnaround’s Building Blocks Cited by the Brookings Institution

In their article, Let’s aspire, but be realistic: What skills can be taught for the 21st century?, Esther Care and Helyn Kim of the Brookings Institution look at to define the skills students need to successfully enter the workforce. The the necessary skills students need to develop to successfully enter the workforce. The article highlights the work of several organizations, including Turnaround’s Building Blocks for Learning, that are working towards arming students with skills and mindsets beyond vocational ones. Here is an excerpt:

“Taking a practical approach, Turnaround for Children’s Building Blocks for Learning is an evidence-based framework for comprehensive student development in schools that focuses on the skills and mindsets that enable students to learn and succeed. Specifically, the skills and mindsets are those that are measurable and teachable, as opposed to fixed personality and character traits. For instance, given the lack of strong evidence that grit is teachable, the framework, instead, includes key teachable building blocks that contribute to grit, such as self-regulation. By identifying the skills that are believed to be important and can be taught, we can begin putting our effort toward how to effectively integrate the teaching of these skills within education systems. The Turnaround approach provides us with a pathway to analyze what can be taught across frameworks proposed by organizations such as the World Economic Forum and OECD, rather than making assumptions that whatever is identified as critical for student success is automatically teachable and learnable at large scale.”

Read the full article here.