Teaching the Whole Teen

Everyday Practices That Promote Success and Resilience in School and Life

"‘Cogent writing, smart content, practical insights, and not a word wasted: Reading Poliner and Benson’s Teaching the Whole Teen is an unusually good use of an educator’s time. Thankfully devoid of simplistic platitudes, the authors reflect real students and teachers and the challenges each group faces in their collective enterprise. Finally, we have a clear-minded, research-based education book written by veteran educators that annihilates the notion of “teen intellect” as oxymoronic, and fully respects the complex realities of modern adolescent lives and brain power.

   
Poliner and Benson get it, and we are better for it: Here, they’ve captured middle and high school students’ quest to mature and connect with both people and content beautifully, and they provide powerful tools to help students and the adults in their lives carve the path forward. The authors prove middle and high school students’ innate resolve to become independent, resilient individuals, even as they stumble in the effort, and the authors demonstrate how mentors can help students accept their current selves while aspiring to be something more.  
    
Teaching the Whole Teen manifests the best thinking in modern education, including actionable steps on developing students’ self-agency and self-regulation, and how to develop communication and executive function skills so vital to school and life success. Their candid approach doesn’t pull any punches: They speak honestly of the bigger issues at play in adolescents’ education: developing a sense of purpose, autonomy, the influences of dominant cultures, dealing with academic and personal setbacks, restorative justice, and developing a healthy work ethic. Thankfully, too, they provide specific responses to the needs of English Language Learners, students in rural communities, students and families in LGBTQ communities, and communities struggling with racial conflicts.

Teaching the Whole Teen is the course all of us wanted to take as undergraduates in our schools of teacher education but was never offered. It answers the burning issues of student motivation, maturation, and how we can facilitate students’ growth in school and at home. And hey, building leaders and novice teachers: There’s specific material here for you!
    
From now on, when a middle or high school teacher asks me during an effective grading practices workshop how we can build responsibility, meaningful connection, personal fortitude, and healthy independence in today’s students if we are no longer allowed to use grades to bribe them into compliance, I’m going to direct them to read Teaching the Whole Teen, then sit back and watch their faces light up in dawning realizations and teacher epiphanies. They’ll finish the book, look up with conviction, and declare, “We can do this!”"

"The authors have painstakingly tackled a very pertinent issue for middle and high school personnel. They not only thoroughly examine the entire child but they also do so by leaving no stone unturned. The child is addressed, the culture is addressed, and the people who work with the children are addressed. This is a great resource for anyone working with adolescents."

"It is deeply refreshing and reinvigorating to read Rachel Poliner and Jeffrey Benson's book, Teaching the Whole Teen. These are two experienced and skilled educators, but it is not in these characteristics, valuable as they are, that their greatest power lies. Poliner and Benson never, ever lose sight of the reasons for which those of us who became educators did so. They carry with great strength and constant clarity the focus on students, their needs, and their best interests. They remind us in every chapter, every concept, every focus and suggestion, that before standards, before testing, before government accountability, before politics, before all of the things that distract and pressure us every day, come the young people whose future we are shaping. Just as vital, they carry with deep assurance the reminder of the great joy and sense of fulfillment that spring inevitably, for both teacher and students, when this priority is maintained.

Teaching the Whole Teen is full of the message we must never forget. Our students are precious individual people whose future has been entrusted to us. We must equip them with what they need to thrive in the world. These things include not only academic knowledge, and that is constantly changing, but an entire palate of skills, knowledge, and abilities. The authors know, with tremendous empathy, what the life of the typical teacher and administrator is like. It is because of this that they are able to craft suggestions and strategies that are sophisticated enough to be entirely workable in the real world.

It is precisely because of the infinite number of interacting characteristics in and among human beings that education is so difficult to truly master and measure. Some disciplines, like mathematics and music, function within closed systems, where a complete understanding of the elements leads to success. Poliner and Benson have such an elegant way of holding and speaking about this complex dance that is teaching and learning. Without distilling it into one or two dimensions, which would misrepresent its essence, they work with specifics that school staff on all levels can instantly embrace and carry into their day. Each section of the book is grounded in research which is clearly referenced and synopsized. More important for the working educator in the field, there follows a series of suggestions and examples with specific emphasis on students of different backgrounds and needs. Included in these are sections with ideas on how to engage parents in the work with secondary children, an area where many educators are hungry for ideas."