About
Dr. Munib Rezaie
Educator. School counselor. Principal. Researcher. Father of two boys. The through-line in all of it: figuring out how to reach adolescent boys before the culture reaches them first.
Educator. School counselor. Principal. Researcher. Father of two boys. The through-line in all of it: figuring out how to reach adolescent boys before the culture reaches them first.
"The boys in your building are already being taught what manhood is. By somebody."
Munib Rezaie spent more than a decade working in K–12 schools — not as a researcher watching from the outside, but as the counselor in the room when boys told him things they couldn't say anywhere else, and later as the principal who had to figure out what to do with that information at a systems level.
He didn't start with a framework. He started with boys who were struggling — with anger, with isolation, with the particular kind of performance that adolescent masculinity demands — and with a set of questions about why the usual interventions weren't working. The curriculum, the writing, and the work that followed were the answer he built for himself, and for them.
The PhD in Communication came from a conviction that the messages boys absorb — from media, from peers, from culture — aren't random. They're structured, they're targeted, and they're more sophisticated than most school-based responses to masculinity give them credit for. Understanding how influence actually works is what makes intervention possible.
The school counseling credential came from something simpler: wanting to be the adult in the building who could actually have the conversation. Not the one who referred boys elsewhere, but the one boys would come back to.
His school closed in April 2026. He took that as the moment to do directly what he'd been building toward inside institutions — bring the curriculum and the approach to more schools, more families, and more of the adults who are doing this work largely without support.
Georgia State University. Dissertation focused on media, social influence, and the mechanisms through which culture shapes identity — with particular attention to how boys are targeted.
Walden University. Licensed school counselor with direct clinical experience working with adolescent boys — individual sessions, group work, and crisis intervention inside K–12 schools.
Every role where the conversation about boys actually happens. Built and ran a structured masculinity/boys' group inside a real school — not a pilot, not a program evaluation. The real thing.
A 6-week curriculum for middle and high school — student sessions, staff professional development, and parent workshops. Designed to change what happens in schools Monday through Friday, not just in a single assembly.
Meet Coach Ben — a picture book about asking for help — received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews (awarded to fewer than 10% of reviewed titles). Also author of three ebooks for parents and educators.
Quoted in Rolling Stone's April 2025 reporting on red-pilled content in schools. Creator of an online course on masculinity used by adults across the country.
The conversation about boys has gotten louder, but it hasn't gotten better. Most of what's in circulation — the think-pieces, the policy proposals, the SEL curricula — is written by people who study boys from the outside. The practitioners who actually work with them every day are too busy to write it down.
Munib spent ten years as one of those practitioners. He's written it down. The Redefining Masculinity curriculum is what he wished he'd had when he walked into that counseling office for the first time: a structured, research-grounded approach to the specific challenge of getting adolescent boys to do the hard work of growing up without losing them in the process.
The other side of this work is more personal. He's a father of two boys. Everything he's learned about what boys need — the relationship before the content, the permission to be more than the performance — he's working through at home the same night he's delivering a professional development session about it. That's not a credential. It's a reminder that the stakes are real.
The goal isn't to produce a generation of boys who've been corrected. It's to produce boys who are capable — of relationships, of honesty, of showing up. The research says it's possible. The schools where it's happening say it's possible. This work is about closing the gap between possible and common.
Quoted on the rise of red-pilled content in schools — April 2025
Starred review for Meet Coach Ben
Feature profile on his decade in K–12 and the curriculum
Coverage of Meet Coach Ben and the values behind the work