Looping, in education, refers to the practice of a teacher remaining with the same group of students for more than one school year. For example, a teacher who teaches a third grade class and then goes on to teach the same students, the following year, for the fourth grade.
This is distinct from the teacher of a multi-age class, who teaches a specific range of school grades together. In this case, although each child remains with the same teacher for multiple years, the group of students being taught changes annually as older children leave the group and are replaced by younger students entering.
Looping is usual in Waldorf education, where the traditional goal has been for a primary teacher to remain as the lead teacher of a class for eight consecutive years, though in conjunction with numerous specialized teachers; over the last decades, many schools have been reducing the loop to a shorter interval.
Educational advantages to having a single teacher have been found, including:
A turn is an element of secondary structure in proteins where the polypeptide chain reverses its overall direction. For beta turns go to Beta turn.
According to one definition, a turn is a structural motif where the Cα atoms of two residues separated by few (usually 1 to 5) peptide bonds are close (< 7 Å), while the residues do not form a secondary structure element such as an alpha helix or beta sheet with regularly repeating backbone dihedral angles. Although the proximity of the terminal Cα atoms usually correlates with formation of a hydrogen bond between the corresponding residues, a hydrogen bond is not a requirement in this turn definition. That said, in many cases the H-bonding and Cα-distance definitions are equivalent.
Turns are classified according to the separation between the two end residues: