Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith has spent her career sitting with children who have lived through the things no child should. As a clinical psychologist and trauma therapist, she has trained herself to ask a different question than most adults reach for. Not “What is wrong with this child?” but “What happened to them?” It sounds like a small shift. In her hands, it is a whole philosophy, one that turns judgment into curiosity, and it may be exactly what burned-out educators need most.
Briscoe-Smith works with children who have experienced trauma, and she has spent years in higher education studying how teachers shape the emotional weather of their classrooms. She is also a faculty member in the William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change, where she helps build the emotional intelligence curriculum. Her central preoccupation lately is a single, urgent pairing: cynicism and curiosity. She has come to believe the second is the antidote to the first, and that the difference shapes whether educators stay in the profession they love.
Cynicism Is a Suit of Armor That Drowns You
Cynicism, in Briscoe-Smith’s telling, is not a personality trait. It is a response to circumstances, and it arrives fast when the workload is crushing, the system is under-resourced, and the marker really does get thrown across the room. Drawing on psychologist Jamil Zaki’s book Hope for Cynics (2024), she defines cynicism as the certainty that everything will turn out badly. Its mirror image, she notes, is naive optimism, the certainty that everything will be fine. Both share a hidden cost: they require nothing of us. “If I 100% know that all of my efforts are for not, I don’t need to do anything,” she says. Cynicism quietly moves people toward learned helplessness.
It also takes a physical toll. Research links cynical hostility to higher cardiovascular risk and to depression, and cynical people tend to treat others more harshly, which provokes the very negativity they predicted. “It’s a suit of armor that will drown us,” she says. “It’s a poison pill, because it really takes away our agency.”
Her alternative is curiosity, what Zaki calls hopeful skepticism, where hope is not wishful thinking but a goal paired with a plan. She likes the writer Rebecca Solnit’s framing that hope is not a lottery ticket you sit on the couch with, but an axe you knock down the door with. In a classroom, curiosity shows up as the smallest of pivots. A lesson flops, a student melts down, and instead of concluding “this never works,” the educator gets to say, “Huh. I wonder.” That tiny “huh,” she argues, is where agency comes back online.
From Following Teachers Into Classrooms to Raising Her Own
As a doctoral researcher, Dr. Briscoe-Smith followed teachers into their classrooms and watched the pattern play out in real time. One teacher told her, “When I am stressed, my students are stressed.” Another said, “When I am calm and collected, my students are calm and collected.” What struck her was that until she asked them directly, the teachers had not connected their own inner state to their students’ behavior. Co-regulation was happening whether they named it or not.
She is also a parent, and her own kids keep handing her the lesson. When she once muttered about a mistake, her eight-year-old replied, “Congratulations, you’re a human,” a line the child had picked up from her own teacher. Years earlier, in a brutally hard stretch of work she thought she was hiding well, her four-year-old announced that when she grew up she wanted to “wear high heels, red lipstick, and yell.” Briscoe-Smith took the cue. Children, she says, are curious about precisely the thing adults work hardest to hide: how a grown-up falls apart and finds the way back. “If you never narrate that you are human and going through something, the kids will think that what’s going on is their fault.”
Building the Emotional Layer of Human Intelligence
Briscoe-Smith’s clinical expertise has a direct home at Breathe for Change. As faculty in the M.S.Ed., she is helping develop the emotional intelligence layer of the Human Intelligence framework, the model of cognitive, emotional, relational, somatic, and universal capacities that drive teaching and learning. Where schools have long overemphasized cognitive intelligence, the thinking-and-testing slice, her work insists that emotion, body, relationship, and purpose are not extras. They are the conditions that make cognition possible in the first place. As she puts it, you do not really get to learn how to read if your basic needs aren’t met and you flood every time the material feels overwhelming.
Where to Start
For educators feeling the pull toward cynicism, Briscoe-Smith offers three steps. First, awareness: simply noticing “I’m feeling cynical and burned out” is itself a win. Second, an inventory of what is working, a gratitude list, even a short one, because attention feeds whatever it lands on. Third, curiosity: when you hit “I could never” or “the system won’t allow it,” get curious about another door, another resource, another way. And for the hardest seasons, one more question: who in your family lived through something hard, and how did they do it?
Educators can find Briscoe-Smith’s thinking on cynicism reflected in Jamil Zaki’s Hope for Cynics, and can go deeper on the emotional and relational skills she teaches through the M.S.Ed. The first move, she would say, is the smallest one: a breath, a question, a single “I wonder.”
