Turning Points
Turning Points is a comprehensive education reform model that focuses on improving student learning. The Turning Points network collaborated to create caring, personalized, and academically rigorous learning communities that are responsive to the needs of the young adolescent. Schools that follow the model engage in improving learning, teaching, and assessment, building a professional collaborative culture, engaging in data-based inquiry and decision making, and creating structures that support high achievement and personal development.
From 2001-2005, CCE served as the National Turning Points Center. Though funding for the initiative has ceased, CCE remains supportive of schools interested in the model and is pleased to house a selection of Turning Points guides online.
To download Turning Points guides, click the links below. Access to this content is complimentary, but you will be asked to register.
At the Turning Point: The Young Adolescent Learner
This guide details the fundamental characteristics of the young adolescent learner and explains how Turning Points schools work to meet the needs of these students.
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Benchmarks to Becoming a Turning Points School
This guide describes how schools can use the Turning Points benchmarks to access their implementation of the model, and includes detailed benchmarks for the six Turning Points practices.
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Creating Partnerships, Bridging Worlds: Family and Community Engagement
This guide offers researched based tools and strategies for helping schools, teachers, families, and communities partner to deepen student learning and engagement.
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Design Overview
This guide is an introduction to the principles, practices, research, and success behind the Turning Point design and model.
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Guide to Collaborative Culture and Shared Leadership
This guide explains the need to create a school culture based on collaboration and shared leadership, redefining the role of teachers and principals for more collaborative decision making.
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Guide to Curriculum Development
This guide explains the five key principles of Turning Points curriculum and development, and includes tools and a template teachers can use to design curriculum and create classroom practices.
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Guide to Data-based Inquiry and Decision Making
This guide documents the Turning Points practice of data-based inquiry that helps teachers, administrators, and community members use data to address the challenges facing a school.
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Looking Collaboratively at Student and Teacher Work
This guide provides six protocols that will help a school community collaboratively analyze student and teacher work to improve instructional practice and the quality of teacher discourse.
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School Structures that Support Learning and Collaboration
This guide addresses structural issues such as establishing small learning communities, and includes concrete examples of structures and processes explaining how these can be adapted to meet the needs of individual schools.
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Teaching Literacy in the Turning Points School
This guide provides a framework for developing a comprehensive approach to literacy in middle schools that is embedded across the curriculum.
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Understanding Learning: Assessment in the Turning Points School
This guide provides a framework for thinking about classroom assessment in the middle grades, and challenges the paradigm of standardized tests.
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