Less than half of middle and high school students, 48 percent, look forward to going to school every day or most days, according to a Gallup and Walton Family Foundation survey of more than 1,700 students this spring (Gallup & Walton Family Foundation, via Education Week, 2026). By late September, most of us have sorted the rest of the room, usually without meaning to. There are the kids who are loud about it, and the kids we’ve decided just don’t care. That second group is worth a closer look. For a lot of disengaged students, checking out was never a choice, because their nervous systems got there first.
The label shows up early, and it sticks. Beth Schreiber, a former second-grade teacher, puts it with an honesty most of us will recognize. She remembers “truly and honestly having that little voice inside where I still wanted to reach the kid, but in my head was labeled as a troubled child or a bad kid.” She knows where it goes next, too: “it’s often sadly how these children are passed from year to year, from teacher to teacher.”
“Doesn’t Care” Is a Diagnosis We Were Never Trained to Make
First, the label deserves some credit. Sorting is how a teacher with thirty students and fifty minutes gets through a lesson. The “doesn’t care” pile lets us keep teaching the kids who are reaching back, and the pressure behind it is real. In an EdWeek Research Center survey this spring, 75 percent of educators named student behavior a major concern for 2026-27, and 70 percent named student engagement (Education Week, 2026). Caring teachers run this sort because most teacher preparation never handed them a better one.
Trouble starts when the label stops being triage and starts shaping the teaching. Dr. Ilana Nankin, co-founder and co-CEO of Breathe for Change, studied teachers’ deficit language about students in graduate school. It kept collapsing into one conclusion: “oh, they just don’t care… or they don’t want to be here.” Then came the part that matters most: “these stories that we start to formulate about who our students are literally shift the way we teach them.”
Our field has tried to answer the unreachable student before. We went from rules to consequences to restorative conversations, and each rung was built to reach the kids the last one missed. We take a closer look at the consequences rung in when consequences stop working. The next rung starts from the question at the heart of a trauma-informed approach, which swaps “What’s wrong with you?” for “What happened to you?” (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA], 2014). In a classroom, we can pull that question into the present: what’s happening in you right now?
Why Disengaged Students Don’t All Look the Same
Ask it that way and the picture shifts. “Disengaged” names a behavior, and underneath it sit at least two opposite states. Psychiatrist Dan Siegel calls the zone where we can think, feel, and stay present the window of tolerance (Siegel, 1999). Push past the top edge and the body tips into hyperarousal, the revved-up state of fight or flight: a racing mind, sweaty palms, a pounding heart. Drop below the bottom edge and you get hypoarousal, a shut-down state. Students look exhausted, put their heads down, or pull a hoodie up and try to disappear.
Shutdown starts in the body. Researchers describe a “defense cascade” of automatic threat responses, including arousal, freezing, fight or flight, and immobility. Each one is driven by distinct neural circuits and triggered without conscious choice (Kozlowska et al., Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 2015). That research leans heavily on clinical and animal studies, so it can’t tell us whether any particular quiet student is in freeze. It does show that freezing is something a body does well before it’s anything a person decides. Keeping both edges of that window in view is where nervous system regulation in the classroom begins.
Fight, Flight, Freeze, and the One That Looks Like Engagement
Once you’re looking for states instead of attitudes, familiar classroom behaviors sort differently. Fight looks like refusal, arguing, blurting, taking up space. Flight can mean darting out of the room. As Beth points out, it can also be something much quieter: “moving your body further away from the rest.” Dr. Ilana knows flight from the inside. In fourth grade, after a humiliating moment at the board in front of the whole class, she sprinted straight out of the room to the bathroom.
Freeze is the one that gets misread as apathy, and the fourth response is even harder to spot. Fawning, a term the therapist Pete Walker uses for appeasing a threat by going along with it (Walker, 2013), can look exactly like a model student. Dr. Ilana describes it in herself as “I’ll just say yes, but like in my body I know it’s a no.” In a classroom, it might sound like a student asking over and over whether their work is okay. “Students that are wanting a lot of extra credit can sometimes be fawners,” she says. “This isn’t necessarily overachieving.”
| Response | What it can look like in class | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| Fight | Refusal, arguing, blurting, taking up space | Above the window (hyperarousal) |
| Flight | Leaving the room, moving away from the group | Above the window (hyperarousal) |
| Freeze | Head down, hoodie up, looking exhausted, going silent | Below the window (hypoarousal) |
| Fawn | Constant “is this okay?”, heavy extra-credit requests | Can pass for engagement |
The four Fs come from practitioners, and nobody’s validated them as a classroom diagnosis. Held loosely, though, they give us a better first guess than “doesn’t care” ever could.
The Students Who Never Interrupt
When we misread, the students who make the least noise pay the most. Beth calls the loud group the externalizers, the students who are “loud, they’re out, they’re in people’s faces.” The quiet group are the internalizers, who “don’t interrupt… but we’re also not accessing that child.” A vignette study of 153 elementary teachers found they spotted severe problems of both kinds accurately but were less accurate with moderate symptoms. They also rated externalizing behavior as more serious than internalizing behavior (Splett et al., School Mental Health, 2019). Those were judgments about hypothetical students rather than real referrals, but the pattern probably sounds familiar.
If you’re an assistant principal, a dean, or anyone who runs transition meetings, this is where the label does its quietest damage. It rides along in hallway handoffs and cumulative notes, year after year. Add one question to those meetings: what state does this student usually arrive in, and what brings them back? That changes what the next teacher inherits.
Reading the State Starts With Our Own
Reading a student’s state is easier than it sounds, partly because our bodies are already doing it. Nervous systems pick up on each other, a pattern researchers call emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993). One Canadian study linked higher teacher burnout to higher morning levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in elementary students. Burnout accounted for more than half of the difference in cortisol between classrooms (Oberle & Schonert-Reichl, Social Science & Medicine, 2016). The data are correlational. Stressed students could just as easily be wearing down their teachers, and that’s the point: the loop runs both ways. Beth used it as a signal. When she noticed her nervous system “would click in and try to join” a dysregulated student, she took the shift as a cue that the room needed something.
Here’s where the Human Intelligence (HI) framework gets practical. It’s Breathe for Change’s five-layer model of how educators think, feel, sense, connect, and find purpose. Its somatic layer starts with interoception, meaning the perception of signals inside the body, and attunement, the ability to actually listen to them. Its emotional layer offers the quickest read we know: the weather report. Students take thirty seconds to turn inward and name their inner weather. Maybe it’s sunny, maybe foggy, maybe a full thunderstorm. Even young students get words for states they can’t name yet.
Ground the Storm, Lift the Fog
Once you know the state, Dr. Ilana is blunt about what shifts first: “My job is not to teach math and literacy right now.” Beth takes it further: “I actually can’t teach math and literacy right now.” The HI framework defines regulation as the capacity to “adapt to what my body actually needs in the moment.” That asks a lot more than quiet hands and a silent hallway. Whatever you try has to fit the state the kids are actually in.
A revved-up class coming in from recess needs grounding. Beth used Find Your Roots with second graders, and Dr. Ilana has used it with high schoolers, college students, and adults. Everyone plants their feet and imagines roots growing down into the soil. A frozen class needs the opposite. Grounding a student in freeze “would maybe even put them further into that state because what they actually need is a little bit more energy.” For them, side stretches, twists, and wrist rolls wake the body back up. More regulation activities for students can fill out the week. Classroom research on matching the response to the state is still emerging, so treat this as Breathe for Change practice grounded in clinical reasoning rather than a settled finding.
Over time, students learn to read themselves. Dr. Ilana still remembers one telling her, “Miss [Ilana], I was so anxious but I just took three deep breaths and now I feel better.” Once a student’s regulated, what keeps them in the room is a reason to be there. That’s the work of connecting learning to students’ own purpose.
A Few Shifts Worth Trying
- Name the state before you name the student. Trade “doesn’t care” for a question: which edge of the window is this kid near?
- Check our own weather first. A dysregulated adult can’t ground a dysregulated room, so the first read is always internal.
- Match the response to the state. Ground a revved-up class, energize a shut-down one, and skip the one-size-fits-all reset.
- Teach the language along with the practice. Students who understand their nervous systems stop believing something’s wrong with them.
It Starts With Us
All of this starts with us, before it ever reaches a student. When Beth described modeling her own frustration out loud for her class, Dr. Ilana named why that matters: “we always start with the self.” That’s the principle behind the William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change. Educators build these capacities in themselves before they teach them. Breathe for Change has certified 20,000+ educators. When you’re ready to go deeper, the M.S.Ed. is a place to start.
Forty-eight percent is a hard number to sit with. The other half of the room is full of students fighting, fleeing, saying yes with a no in their bodies, or sitting very still in the back row. Some of them are frozen, waiting for an adult to ask what’s happening in them instead of deciding they don’t care.
Want to go deeper? Listen to the full conversation between Dr. Ilana Nankin and Beth Schreiber on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast. They cover the four Fs, the weather report, and how to ground or energize a room.
