The bell rings before you’ve said hello to everyone. A student at the door won’t meet your eyes. Another’s already scrolling. A third announces, loud enough for the row behind her to hear, that she hates math. You’ve got five days to set the tone of the whole year.
Chrizia Dela Rosa, the 2026 California Teacher of the Year, teaches math at Piedmont Hills High School in San Jose. Over 13 years, she’s built a first-week system that treats belonging as the ground learning grows out of, not the reward for it. Five practices carry the week:
- Greet every student by name at the door
- Teach the neuroscience of learning before you teach content
- Open every class with a daily check-in
- Build a mid-period reset into every lesson
- Design belonging for the students on the margins
Here’s how it looks in her room, and how to adapt it for yours.
Names at the Door, Before Anything Else
Chrizia stands outside her door before every period and greets every student by name. She doesn’t stop until the last one is through. “Sometimes the bell will ring and I still haven’t gotten through saying hi to everybody,” she says.
A randomized study of 203 middle school students found that positive greetings at the door increased academic engaged time by 20 percent and cut disruptive behavior by 9 percent, roughly an extra hour of learning per day (Cook et al., Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 2018). Direct high school replication is thin, but the mechanism travels well: being seen by an adult who knows your name changes what you’re able to do next. Dr. Ilana Nankin, co-founder and co-CEO of Breathe for Change, notes that positive greetings at the door are taught directly in the relational intelligence component of the William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change.
Start with your roster and phonetic spellings. A few minutes rehearsing names before tomorrow morning goes a long way.
Nervous Systems First, Content Second
Chrizia spends her first week not on math but on nervous systems. She has students touch their foreheads to find the prefrontal cortex, jokes that the hippocampus is a “hip campus” where memories check in, and chucks a soft stress ball into the room without warning to surface fight, flight, and freeze in real time. “When your brain shuts off there’s going to be this block for you,” she tells them. “And so we have to make sure your brain is calm.”
Chronic stress disrupts the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus: the systems students need to encode and retrieve new material (Cantor et al., Applied Developmental Science, 2018). Teaching what the brain’s doing puts the language of self-regulation in students’ mouths before the first quiz. For more on how nervous system regulation shapes classroom behavior, see Breathe for Change’s three nervous system tools to regulate student behavior.
A Five-Minute Check-In to Open the Period
Chrizia opens each period with a Google Form: five minutes, three questions, attendance built in. Students self-report how they’re feeling, and she scans responses live. If a student flags a rough day, she writes a post-it: hey, want to talk, or want to email me later?
Breathe for Change teaches this as the two-word check-in, small enough to run daily, powerful enough to compound. Brief daily emotional check-ins are one of the core mechanisms through which SEL (social-emotional learning) produces academic results: a meta-analysis of 213 school-based SEL programs across 270,034 K-12 students found an 11-percentile-point gain in academic achievement, with effects consistent across elementary and secondary levels (Durlak et al., Child Development, 2011). Check-ins build the emotional awareness and relational safety that make those gains possible. For the research on why co-regulation makes this work, see co-regulation as the science of SEL facilitation.
A Reset in the Middle of Every Lesson
Halfway through a 50-minute period, Chrizia hands the reset over to her students. “Someone’s got to remind me because you know me, I’m jumping all over the place,” she tells them. On heavy days, she nudges the LED lights along the classroom walls to yellow. When energy tanks, she runs a two-hand math number game. When the room feels wound up, she leads a four-count inhale and an eight-count exhale.
Slow breathing with a longer exhale than inhale activates parasympathetic dominance through increased vagal tone, producing measurable reductions in heart rate and subjective anxiety (Zaccaro et al., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2018). Teach the ratio once. Let students call for it before a test.
Belonging by Design for the Students Most Likely to Slip Through
Chrizia arrived from the Philippines at six, speaking no English. She hid her Filipino food at lunch, and every mispronunciation of her name added a small weight. The system above (name-first greetings, written check-ins, the option to exchange papers instead of speaking) isn’t incidental. It’s the classroom she needed. Research from five secondary schools in England found that moments of teacher recognition of students’ languages and cultures were consistently linked to increased confidence, motivation, and sense of belonging (Rutgers et al., Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 2021). July is when to build this in, not October.
Frequently Asked Questions
What community building activities work best in the first week of high school?
The research points toward daily, low-stakes practices over one-time icebreakers: name-based door greetings, brief emotional check-ins, and an explicit lesson on how the nervous system affects learning. These habits compound across the year. One-time activities can open the week; daily practices sustain the room.
How do you build a sense of belonging in a high school classroom?
Start with the students who’re easiest to miss: the quiet ones, the newly arrived, the ones whose names get mispronounced. Name-first greetings, written check-ins (so students don’t have to speak publicly to be heard), and explicit acknowledgment of students’ backgrounds are three practices that research links to increased confidence, motivation, and belonging.
How long does first-week community building actually take?
Chrizia’s system uses the first five days intensively, then maintains through daily check-ins and mid-period resets. The neuroscience lesson takes the first week. The check-in form takes five minutes per period. The door greeting takes the time before the bell. The investment is front-loaded; the payoff compounds.
Where to Begin Tomorrow
Your roster with phonetic spellings is a good place to start. A few quiet minutes with it before tomorrow’s first period goes further than you’d expect. Or build the three-question Google Form check-in and schedule it to auto-open at the start of every period next week. Small daily commitments outlast elaborate systems that collapse by October.
What Consistency Actually Feels Like
The bell still rings before you’ve said hello to everyone. What changes is the room. Students who’ve been seen consistently show up differently. They come in already knowing what their nervous system is doing. They ask for the breathing reset before the test. Consistency, from the educator’s end, is what students experience as belonging. It’s also what makes the math possible.
For more first-week structure, see Breathe for Change’s sustaining belonging beyond the first week with the 11-day Belonging Challenge and its classroom management strategies that center student wellbeing.
Want to hear Chrizia’s full story? Listen to the conversation between Dr. Ilana Nankin and Chrizia Dela Rosa on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast. They cover her origin story, the classroom practices above in more detail, and what it took to be named California Teacher of the Year.
