In Getting Real About Sex Ed, Shafia Zaloom offers educators, administrators, and caregiving adults concrete language and strategies for integrating sexuality education into daily practice, beginning with students in kindergarten and carrying through to high school graduation.

Shafia advocates Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE), a holistic framework for K–12 classrooms that addresses the cognitive, emotional, social, and physical aspects of sexuality. The book highlights how CSE scaffolds the sexual development of students as it gradually layers in age-appropriate information, skills, and positive values to practice and prepare for safe and fulfilling relationships, as well as how students can take responsibility for their own sexual health and well-being.

Zaloom draws on the latest research and presents real-world scenarios from classrooms across the country that all educators face in developing students’ personal citizenship. With warmth, empathy, and insight, she guides teachers beyond the classroom to the in-between moments of educational spaces: the lunchroom, playground, hallways, and transition periods. She models how educators can deliver developmentally appropriate lessons across grades to inspire personal reflection, integrity, and the capacity to connect with others in community.

In this vital, actionable work, Zaloom ultimately shows how a comprehensive approach to teaching sexuality education equips young people with life skills they need to cultivate mutual respect, care, dignity, and joy in sustained relationships, whether sexual or not, and contribute to a compassionate and just society.

Advance Reviews:

"Zaloom's book honors the whole child: body, mind, heart, spirit, as well as the caring adults struggling to do right by the children they love. Shafia's whole-hearted approach to sexuality education -- warm, smart, funny, and brave -- is exactly what's needed most today."

- All Vernacchio, author of For Goodness Sex: A Sex-Positive Guide to Raising Healthy, Empowered Teens

"Urgent, practical, inclusive and compassionate, this is not just a book for sex ed teachers -- it's a book for all teachers, because it speaks to challenges, topics, and questions that all K-12 teachers will encounter."

- Jennifer S. Hirsch, professor of sociomedical sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and coauthor of Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus