Across 99 studies involving more than 100,000 students from preschool through high school, positive teacher-student relationships showed medium-to-large associations with student engagement and small-to-medium associations with academic achievement (Roorda et al., Review of Educational Research, 2011). The effects grew stronger in secondary school: precisely the setting least served by current teacher preparation.
Relationships and regulation are the precondition for learning, not the soft edge of it. And in classrooms where students feel safe enough to learn, the teacher is running two clocks at once. One builds regulation over time. The other restores it in the moment. Chrizia Dela Rosa, the 2026 California Teacher of the Year, runs both, usually without thinking about it. This piece breaks down what those two clocks are, and how they fit into the five capacities that make them work.
Why Teacher Prep Skips These Capacities
Most preparation programs train educators to deliver content. What they rarely train is the somatic, emotional, cognitive, relational, and universal capacities that decide whether a student can actually receive that content. Dr. Ilana Nankin, co-founder and co-CEO of Breathe for Change, spent her PhD leading a teacher preparation program before starting the company, and her read on it is blunt: prep trains educators to teach subjects, not to address behavior, manage a room, or care for their own well-being while doing either. Chrizia lived that gap too: 22 years old in her first Teach For America placement in Miami, crying on the couch, wondering if she could do this at all.
A synthesis of neuroscience and developmental science identifies psychological safety and warm relational environments as non-negotiable preconditions for learning: chronic stress disrupts the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus students need to encode and retrieve material, and attuned teacher-student relationships restore access to those systems (Cantor et al., Applied Developmental Science, 2018). Breathe for Change built the Human Intelligence framework to name the five capacities prep leaves out. Chrizia is what the framework looks like when a teacher lives inside it.
The Two Clocks: Proactive and Responsive
Chrizia runs two clocks at once in her classroom. One clock is proactive: a daily check-in, a neuroscience lesson in the first week, a closing reflection at the end of every period. That clock runs every day, regardless of the room’s temperature. The other is responsive: a mid-period breathing reset when the class gets squirrelly, LED lights shifting to yellow when the day feels heavy, a quick number game when energy tanks in the last ten minutes.
The proactive clock builds the long-term conditions in which regulation is possible. The responsive clock meets the room where it actually is on any given day. Most classroom advice collapses these into a single thing (“build relationships,” “manage the room”) and loses the practice in the process. You need both clocks, and you need to know which one you’re running.
The Framework: Five Capacities, Two Clocks
Here is where the two clocks stop being a slogan and become a tool. The clocks answer when you regulate. The Human Intelligence framework answers what you are developing, five capacities: somatic, emotional, cognitive, relational, and universal. Put them together and you get a grid. Every practice in your classroom is one of the five capacities that can be run on one of the two clocks.
A breathing routine you open with every morning is somatic, on the proactive clock. A mid-period reset when the room tips over is somatic, on the responsive clock. Same capacity, different clock. Once you can name a practice by its layer and its clock, you can see what your classroom is actually building, and, more usefully, what it is missing. Chrizia’s room is not a pile of clever tricks. It is all five capacities, deliberately run on both clocks.
The Five Layers, Live in a Classroom
Somatic. On the proactive clock, Chrizia teaches the four-count inhale and eight-count exhale before she teaches slope. On the responsive clock, she reads the room’s nervous system through her LED light color, shifts to yellow on a heavy day, and calls a mindful break when a student reminds her mid-period. Slow breathing with a longer exhale than inhale activates parasympathetic dominance via increased vagal tone, producing measurable reductions in heart rate and subjective anxiety (Zaccaro et al., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2018).
Emotional. The daily Google Form check-in is proactive emotional-data collection at scale. Reading it in real time and handing a student a post-it (hey, want to talk, or want to email me later?) is the responsive move. Meta-analytic evidence across 213 school-based social-emotional learning programs and 270,034 students found an 11-percentile-point academic gain over controls (Durlak et al., Child Development, 2011). That is the leverage of paying attention to feelings before content.
Relational. Door greetings by name, star-of-the-day slides, group-work rituals, a syllabus review turned into Jeopardy: these are proactive relational practices Chrizia runs every morning without thinking about it, which is what internalized relational intelligence looks like. Positive greetings at the door increased academic engaged time by 20 percent in a randomized study of middle school students (Cook et al., Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 2018).
Cognitive. Chrizia opens the year with a foundational lesson on the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, which her husband taught her to call the “hip campus” so students would remember it. She uses Jo Boaler’s YouCubed geometry activities from Stanford to make math approachable in the first week, framing the discipline as a shared language rather than a threat. For more on how cognitive capacity works alongside emotional and relational skill, see the science of co-regulation and SEL facilitation.
Universal. By spring, Chrizia’s students find purpose in showing up. She puts it in seven words: “I think it’s really important for people to find their people.” The classroom is where that becomes possible: the payoff of running all four other layers, on both clocks, across a year.
Try this week: three starting points across the layers
The lowest-lift moves in Chrizia’s playbook: practices you can run regardless of what else is happening in your room. Each is labeled by its layer and its clock, so you can see the grid in action.
- Proactive / Somatic: Open with the 4-count inhale, 8-count exhale before your first lesson of the day. Breathe alongside your students. 90 seconds.
- Proactive / Emotional: A 2-question Google Form before the bell: “How are you walking in today?” and one question tied to the previous day’s content. Scan it while they settle. The practice signals that emotional data matters here.
- Responsive / Relational: Door greetings by name, every morning. Cook et al. found a 20% lift in engaged time from this single move alone. If you’re already doing it, notice what happens when you miss a day.
The Two Questions That Tell You Whether a Practice Will Hold
The proactive-versus-responsive distinction gives you a filter for any practice you already run or want to try. Two questions: is it in my daily rhythm regardless of what’s happening in the room? And do I have a tool ready when the room shifts? A practice that answers neither is decoration. A classroom that answers both, across all five layers, is one where belonging accumulates.
What the M.S.Ed. Was Built For
The William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change, was designed to train educators in all five layers of Human Intelligence: precisely the material teacher prep leaves out. The 30-credit degree is regionally accredited through William Jewell College, an HLC-accredited institution, FAFSA-eligible, and delivered fully online with live virtual sessions. For educators pursuing a graduate degree for salary lane advancement, the M.S.Ed. may increase earning potential; specific salary impact varies by district and state.
Chrizia’s classroom isn’t idiosyncratic. It’s the outcome of a set of trainable capacities. Breathe for Change has certified more than 20,000 educators and worked with 750 district partners toward that end. The M.S.Ed. is where those capacities become a discipline, where the two clocks and five layers stop being something you improvise and become something you can teach on purpose. For educators ready to build them deliberately, start with the M.S.Ed. deposit.
The Future of Secondary Teaching
The Roorda meta-analysis this piece opened with found relationship effects growing stronger in secondary school, the setting where teacher prep is thinnest and where students most often disengage. That’s the growth edge. Educators who want to build classrooms like Chrizia’s don’t need to reinvent the practices. They need training in the layers of Human Intelligence that make the practices work, room to run them on both clocks, and permission to treat them as core curriculum. For a deeper read on the science, see the neuroscience behind why human intelligence determines learning outcomes.
Hear more from Chrizia Dela Rosa and Dr. Ilana Nankin on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast: her origin story, the classroom practices in more detail, and what it took to be named California Teacher of the Year.
