Blaze Your Own Trail

Description

Empower teens to build their own paths with strategies that encourage self-discovery, autonomy, and connection. 
Blaze Your Own Trail invites teens to consider their values, goals, and interests, and take steps toward building the life—and blazing the trail—they want for themselves. Teens follow the three sections of the book—the inner path, the outer path, and the onward path—to explore a breadth of topics, from developing a vision for their future and boosting their self-regulation strategies and emotional intelligence to making time for rest, practicing gratitude, and connecting with others.   
 
This student-facing partner to The Balanced Teacher Path presents teens with ideas for seeking purpose, joy, and balance in their lives. To enrich and inform the book, award-winning teacher Justin Ashley surveyed the teens he’s worked with. Blaze Your Own Trail gives teens the freedom to read what’s most relevant to them in the moment with short, easy-to-digest chapters.
 
Far from a prescriptive guidebook, Blaze Your Own Trail supports teens in their journey to creating their own path—and destination.  Justin Ashley is an award-winning teacher, motivational speaker, author, and public education advocate from Charlotte, North Carolina, where he began teaching in 2007. He is also a highly sought-after speaker for professional development. He has been an inspirational keynote presenter for thousands of current and future teachers, creating an atmosphere that bounces back and forth between rapt silence and raucous laughter. In 2013, he became the only teacher ever to win both North Carolina History Teacher of the Year and North Carolina Social Studies Teacher of the Year in the same year.
Cory Thomas is a Trinidad-born illustrator, writer, and interesting man. As a kid, his artistic abilities began to manifest themselves through his majestic stick figures and exquisite scribbling. Substituting comic books for friends, he developed an interest in art and quickly became one of the preeminent six-year-olds in his field. In 2005 he began the newspaper comic strip Watch Your Head and in 2013 began his journey into middle-grade literature. Cory now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Netflix, and too many hats.  Empower teens to build their own paths with strategies that encourage self-discovery, autonomy, and connection.

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