Teaching adolescents is both a unique challenge and an exciting opportunity. Given that adolescents are wading through a particularly impressionable stage of the identity formation process, the influence that teachers, their peers, and the school environment as a whole can have on adolescents has the capacity to be great. As educators, it is useful to consider not only the broader psychological facets of adolescents, but also to understand the social factors influencing the lives of adolescents, both academically and socially.
In this website (which is a partial fulfillment for EDUC 568, Adolescent Literacy at Salem College) we seek to introduce a number of theorists whose work has informed much of educational psychology today, to explore a number of psychosocial topics which impact young students as they work to establish their identity, and to offer some specific strategies to use when teaching adolescents.