Tools for Educators

Turnaround for Children Toolbox

The Turnaround for Children Toolbox is an online hub for science-grounded ideas and resources that empower educators to embed an equitable whole-child purpose into our education system. Through this approach, educators can prioritize relationships as the active ingredient in learning; meet students’ needs in authentically-personalized ways; tap into students’ strengths, interests, and talents; and facilitate academic progress.

Whole-Child Design Blueprint

Turnaround’s Whole-Child Design Blueprint synthesizes research across fields including neuroscience, psychology, and developmental science, enabling educators in any school setting and beyond to apply the principles of whole-child design to unleash students’ learning and development. The Whole-Child Design Blueprint is grounded in how young people really develop and learn; it honors that learning isn’t “academic” OR “social and emotional.” Rather, it reflects the scientific fact that students become increasingly capable of complex skills through the integration of their cognitive, social, and emotional development.

The framework’s components and core practices are a way to think about, organize and integrate the non-negotiables for settings created with the science of learning and development in mind.

Well-Being Index

Science demonstrates what the best educators have always known: All students have unique strengths and needs that vary over time and are expressed differently. When schools recognize and personalize experiences for individual students and remove barriers to learning, they create the conditions that support thriving. But, if a student’s experience and how they feel and function is variable, how can educators capture this in order to support them in a timely, personalized way?

To help educators assess student well-being directly, quickly, and frequently, both in-person and virtually, Turnaround for Children has developed a free new tool: The Well-Being Index. This tool can minimize making assumptions about students and instead support students to understand and look after their own well-being.

Tiered Supports

How can we create an equitable school environment that does not identify the student as the problem, but rather honors individual context (the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement or idea, and in terms by which it can be fully understood and assessed) and addresses inequitable structures, policies and practices in order to meet the needs of students?  We begin to answer this question by designing a tiered system of supports. Turnaround for Children’s approach to tiered supports is grounded in science, proactive, recognizes student assets, and recommends that supports are provided in an integrated way that encourages students to learn and grow.

Responding to Crisis Within A Tiered Supports System

To help schools address the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Turnaround for Children created a new free Action Pack to guide staff, schools and school systems in Responding to Crisis Within a Tiered Supports System. The crisis component of a tiered support system allows for students who are experiencing disruptions in their health, mood, behavior, and/or skill development to receive immediate support.

Building Blocks for Learning

Turnaround for Children’s Building Blocks for Learning is a framework for the development of skills children need for success 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.