It’s the first week back for teachers. Your inbox is filling with district PD reminders. There’s a stack of supply lists on the kitchen counter. You’ve been drafting a seating chart in your head while you make dinner. The shape of the next ten months is already forming around you, and you haven’t even seen your classroom yet.
Here’s what tends to go missing from that pile of prep: you. The whole person who’s going to be in the room. The nervous system that’ll co-regulate every child. The attention that’ll notice when a student is spiraling. The emotional bandwidth that keeps you present through November grading, February exhaustion, and April state tests. Students feel that inner instrument the moment they walk in. Tune it before Day One.
At Breathe for Change, we teach the Human Intelligence framework across five interconnected layers: Somatic, Emotional, Cognitive, Relational, and Universal. The ten practices below come directly from that curriculum, paired two-to-a-layer, and organized as a back-to-school routine for teachers who want to build from the inside out.
Every practice has the same two use cases. Dr. Ilana Nankin, co-founder of Breathe for Change, puts it this way: you can build these into consistent routines proactively, or you can reach for them responsively in the heightened moments you didn’t plan for. The more you practice one way, the more accessible the other becomes.
Here are the ten.
Somatic: coming home to the body
1. Three Collective Breaths. Three intentional breaths, taken with awareness inside the body. That’s the whole practice.
- Proactively: First breath of the morning, before your feet touch the floor. Again before the bell rings, before you open the classroom door.
- Responsively: A fight breaks out. A student escalates. Your own chest tightens. Three breaths, right there.
- Try this today: Set a phone alarm for 10:00 a.m., 12:30 p.m., and 3:00 p.m. When it goes off, take the three breaths. That’s it.
2. Beginning, Middle, and End of Day. A three-part daily practice built on top of Three Collective Breaths, layering in intention and embodied movement.
- Beginning: Three breaths. Find one word for how you want to show up (calm, present, playful, focused). Add a small movement that anchors the word in your body: hands to heart for compassion, hands overhead for high energy, a soft smile for joy.
- Middle: Come back to the word around lunch. Take three breaths. Re-embody. If you drifted, choose again. Nothing wasted.
- End: Reflect. Find one moment when you lived the word today. That reflection is the practice.
- Try this today: Pick tomorrow’s word tonight. Sleep on it.
Emotional: building your capacity to feel
3. The Two-Word Check-In. Turn your attention inward. See how you feel. Find two words for the vibe. That’s the whole ask. The Two-Word Check-In practice has a longer walkthrough if you want it.
- Proactively: Once at the top of every planning period. Once before you leave the parking lot.
- Responsively: Any moment your body signals something is off and you can’t yet name it.
- Try this today: Do it right now. Write the two words down. That’s your baseline.
4. Affirmations. The itty-bitty committee inside your head has a script. Some of it is old. Not good enough. Can’t handle this year. Never going to catch up. An affirmation is the deliberate replacement of one of those lines with something you’re actively choosing to believe.
- Proactively: Same slot as the Beginning of Day practice. One line, out loud, once.
- Responsively: The moment you catch the old script running.
- Try this today: Write down one disempowering story you’ve been telling yourself about this year. Then write the replacement.
Cognitive: focusing your attention
5. Protect the Field. The environment around you is shaping your focus whether you notice it or not. Protect the Field means proactively removing what pulls your attention before it pulls it.
- Proactively: Turn off phone notifications for the school day. Clear the top of your desk before you leave each afternoon. Set a hard boundary on where the schoolwork lives at home.
- Responsively: When you catch yourself doom-scrolling at 9:00 p.m., look around and reset the room.
- Try this today: Turn off two notifications right now. Any two.
6. Shine Your Spotlight. You have a finite beam of attention. The world will move that spotlight for you if you don’t move it yourself.
- Proactively: Name the one thing that’s the priority for the next 30 minutes. Say it out loud if it helps.
- Responsively: You catch that the spotlight has drifted to tomorrow’s meeting, or last night’s argument, or a worry about a student. Notice, and gently return.
- Try this today: Try one 30-minute block where the spotlight holds one thing. Then do it again tomorrow.
Relational: staying in the connection
7. Stay Anchored. The instinct to say yes in the moment is what turns August into November burnout. Stay Anchored is the practice of pausing before you commit.
- Proactively: Set the rule now: no immediate yeses this year. Give yourself until tomorrow to answer. Ask, Am I a hell yes or a no? If it isn’t a hell yes, it’s a no.
- Responsively: Someone catches you in the hallway with an ask. One phrase, ready to go: “Let me sit with it and get back to you tomorrow.”
- Try this today: Draft your one-line response. Have it ready.
8. Desires, Fears, and Requests. A relational practice for moving any conversation forward with clarity. You name what you want (desire), what you’re afraid of (fear), and what you’re asking for from the other person (request).
- Proactively: Before a hard conversation with a colleague, a partner, an administrator, run through your own D-F-R first. Know them before you communicate them.
- Responsively: A conversation starts to unravel. Pause and name one of the three out loud.
- Try this today: Pick a relationship where something is unresolved. Journal your D-F-R. You don’t have to say any of it yet. Knowing is the first step.
Universal: connecting to something bigger
9. Loving Kindness. A guided reflection that expands outward: from the self, to the people who light you up, to your larger community, to all beings. At each ring you offer the same wishes: May we be happy. May we be healthy. May we be safe. May we be free.
- Proactively: Once a week, on a Sunday evening, before you look at the coming week.
- Responsively: When you’re carrying the weight of a hard news day, a difficult student, a conflict you can’t shake.
- Try this today: Set a timer for four minutes and try it.
10. Hopes and Dreams. A future-visioning practice. What do you hope for this school year? Who do you want to be? Fast-forward to the last day of school. It’s June. What did you build? Then return to the present and say to yourself: I deserve these hopes and dreams. I can and I will fulfill them.
- Proactively: This week, before the school year starts.
- Responsively: Any moment you’ve lost the thread of why you do this work.
- Try this today: Write down three hopes for the year. Post them where you’ll see them in October.
When the routine slips
You’re going to miss the mark. You’ll skip a day. Skip a week. That’s fine. Coming back is the whole practice. A small, consistent return, day after day, is what changes the shape of a school year. That’s what these ten practices are built for: not a flawless routine, but a durable one.
The supply lists on the kitchen counter are real. So is the person who’s going to use them. Ten practices. Five layers. One August that might feel different from every August before it.
The practices above come from the Human Intelligence curriculum inside the William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change. If you want to take this deeper, learn more about the M.S.Ed. The M.S.Ed. is enrolling now.
Two related reads for the framework itself: why self-knowledge is step one in the Human Intelligence framework and what it means to teach from the inside out.
Want to go deeper? Listen to Dr. Ilana Nankin on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast. She walks through each of the ten practices, with guided pauses to try them along the way.
