The Touchstones Classroom
Touchstones gives your students the tools to engage in respectful discussion about their opinions and ideas while developing leadership skills.
How Touchstones Works
Touchstones uses a systematic and intentional approach to help your students build high level speaking, listening, and critical thinking skills. Lessons happen once a week alongside your existing curricula and programs and build skills that your students can apply anywhere – in school or in life!
1. Ground Rules
Five ground rules anchor your students in respectful discussion, and are referred back to throughout the lesson.
2. Text for Discussion
Texts serve as tools to support inclusive group dynamics and raise ideas that all your students can explore.
3. Individual Work
Individual activities provide space for your students to connect their own experiences and opinions to the ideas in the text.
4. Small Group Work
Small groups provides a safer space for sharing ideas, and help your students practice collaborative learning.
5. Whole Group Discussion
Your students share and explore ideas together, while learning to recognize their own strengths and make space for others.
6. Discussion Evaluation
Our evaluation tools help your students reflect, recognize and take responsibility for group dynamics, and set goals for the next week.
What can I expect from Touchstones?
Touchstones strengthens the work you’re already doing to build your students’ discourse skills, enhancing the outcomes of programs and strategies like Socratic seminar, restorative practices, International Baccalaureate, and AVID. Our essential skills align with many states’ English Language Arts speaking and listening standards, as well as civics skills standards and social-emotional learning frameworks, including 21st Century Skills.
Touchstones Essential Skills
Confidence
Speaking
Active Listening
Leadership
Reflective Thinking
Analytical Reasoning
Cooperative Learning
Evidenced-Based Results
Touchstones is research-based and refined by over 38 years of teacher feedback – so we know how powerful it can be! Here’s what schools report about student growth across grade levels after just one year using the program.
↑ 85%
of students improved critical thinking skills
↑ 82%
of students listened more attentively to peers
↑ 83%
of students spoke directly to each other, rather than through the teacher
↓ 21%
reduction in school-wide instances of bullying
What Schools Are Saying About Touchstones
“Through Touchstones Discussion class, we have learned to communicate with our fellow human beings, an essential skill for survival. [It] has helped us…to start to examine the world around us.”
Alexander, 8th Grade Student
St. Martin’s-in-the-Field Day School, MD
“Touchstones is more than a once a week lesson for me in my room, it is a way of life. It is a method of teaching and a mindset. It has changed everything for me. I no longer ask kids to raise their hands in my room. We follow the Ground Rules even when we are not in the circle. It has changed the way I think, interact and respond to others. It is my constant. I thank you and the project!”
T. Miller
Teacher, Rising Sun Middle School, MD
“Thanks to Touchstones, our students are better listeners and better problem-solvers and much more considerate of one another.”
Karole Turner-Campbell
Director, Frederick Douglass Academy II, NY
What makes Touchstones different?
In a Touchstones class, teachers take on the role of learner, students become leaders, and the text for discussion strategically builds skills.
The Role of Your Students
The Role of the Teacher
The Role of the Texts
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