Facilitating students’ unique paths towards identity development is the key to teaching young teens.

Students face pressures that undermine the development of a solid sense of self, jeopardizing success in school and in life: Family issues, economic concerns, media influences, social pressures, physical changes, and more influence how students feel about themselves.
When these go unnoticed, even the best teaching methods fall short. Reach Before You Teach shows educators how to form the nurturing, individualized connections that make students feel worthy, fulfilled, and ready to flourish as learners.

The book details:

• Practical, empowering information about how a sense of self comes to be, and what threatens it.
• Interventions that soften the myriad defenses students develop to protect themselves.
• How to address the often-overlooked connections between physical, social, and emotional health and classroom performance.

Packed with real-life examples and results-delivering exercises, Reach Before You Teach supplies educators with the all-important skills to connect with students so academic and life success feels more attainable.

“In our present education system that seems to be caught up with numbers and standardization, this book is a welcomed read. Education will never improve if we don’t make the social-emotional skills of children our first priority.”
—Peter DeWitt, Principal
Poestenkill Elementary School, NY

“This book is a must-read for all who want to encourage self-awareness and self-reflection during classroom instruction and help students feel more connected, curious, and confident! Students no doubt will achieve emotionally and academically with help from the strategies in this book.”
—Dr. Ann Marie Dargon, Assistant Superintendent of Schools
Westport Community Schools, MA

The benefits and features of this book include:

• Details seven straightforward, easy to implement steps to ignite passion and purpose in your classroom.
• Demonstrates the ethical necessity to reach the whole child and foster his potentials socially, emotionally, physically and, yes, cognitively.
• Includes a plethora of real life teacher illustrations showing the power and impact of the tools and strategies given.
• Provides over 50 interventions to reach and connect with each student in your classroom, particularly those students that seem to defy your previous attempts at connection and instruction.
• Offers techniques and strategies to form authentic connections with students and explains why these connections you create can mean the difference between thriving students and those who drop out.
• Incorporates opportunities to check in with yourself to develop awareness as to how your habits and views impact your teaching style.
• Details the functions and structure of the brain and offers ideas on how to share this information with your students.
• Explains how social emotional skills and focusing on the self will foster 21st century skills.