It’s a Tuesday in mid-July. School’s been out for weeks. You’ve slept in, cleaned out the closet, started three books you haven’t finished. And still, when you sit down to plan for August, something doesn’t quite fire the way it used to.
The work matters. You wouldn’t have given it ten, fifteen, twenty years if it didn’t. But the connection to why is harder to reach than it was when you started, and purpose gets dimmer when the cup is empty.
You aren’t imagining it. In spring 2025, 67% of K–12 teachers reported feeling a strong sense of purpose and hope about the future (EdChoice, Morning Consult, 2025). Across a separate 2025 survey, 53% of teachers reported feeling burned out all the time (Doan et al., RAND, 2025). Two different samples, two different question wordings, one paradox teachers live every day: the heart is still in it, and the tank is empty.
The story most educators get handed is that the fix is to give more to yourself. Fill your own cup. Take better care. Fine as far as it goes. There’s another move that goes further, and this is the summer to practice it. Instead of pouring only from your own cup, you can learn to receive from something larger.
At Breathe for Change, that layer of receiving from something greater than yourself is what we call Universal Intelligence, the fifth of five layers in the Human Intelligence framework, and part of why human intelligence starts with the educator. It’s the capacity for wonder, trust, integrity, gratitude, and purpose. If you want the fuller picture of what Universal Intelligence actually is, start there. Five practices from the William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change, correspond to those five competencies. Try one a week between now and back-to-school.
Wonder: take a wonder wander
Stress narrows attention. The old finding from psychologist J. A. Easterbrook still holds up: under high arousal, you filter out peripheral information and lock in on threat-relevant cues (Easterbrook, Psychological Review, 1959). That contraction is the opposite of wonder.
The practice is simple. Walk somewhere you already know. Around the block. Through your kitchen. Down a school hallway before it’s full. Don’t walk through it. Look at it. A texture, a color, a piece of light you’ve stopped seeing. Let the small mundane thing become interesting again. Your students already do this every day.
Trust: connect the dots
Open a notebook. Journey back through the school year that just ended, and land on three moments that were hard: a conflict with a student, a leadership shift, a day you didn’t show up the way you wanted to. For each one, write two sentences: how it felt in the moment, and how it has shaped you since.
Meaning tends to reveal itself later than you’d like. This practice makes room for that. When you can connect the dots on the year behind you, trust becomes easier to extend to the year in front of you.
Integrity: choose what’s true
Sit with a blank page. On one side, write your values. Not aspirational ones, the real ones: family, freedom, connection, learning, integrity. On the other side, write one sentence answering a single question: what is life asking of me right now? An unfinished conversation. A boundary you haven’t drawn. A gift you’ve been sitting on.
Integrity is the alignment of thought, word, and action with both your values and what the world is asking of you. Choosing what’s true means holding both at once.
Gratitude: see the web
Structured gratitude practice has small but consistent effects on educator wellbeing. A 2025 mixed-methods study of teachers who kept a gratitude journal reported reductions in work-related stress and improvements in job satisfaction (Karimnia et al., Psychology in the Schools, 2025). The evidence base is still emerging, and the practice costs nothing to try.
Try this version. Name three students by name. Trace the ripple. Who does each student go home to. Who will they teach one day. Who will their students go home to. Awe tends to arrive somewhere around the third or fourth ripple. Sit with it for a minute before you close the notebook.
Purpose: write a life mission statement
Set aside twenty minutes and try to name your mission in six words or fewer. Not an essay. Not a paragraph. Six words. My mission is to _____. Draft it. Sit with it. Draft it again tomorrow. You won’t land it on the first try. That’s the point.
The clarity is the reward. When August arrives, you’ll have one sentence to come back to on the hard days.
Try this today
Pick one of the five. Not all at once. Do it once this week. Notice what shifts.
Purpose doesn’t get restored by pushing harder into the work. Opening a door you’d forgotten was there does the restoring, and this summer is the door.
When you’re ready to build all five layers of Human Intelligence systematically, inside a cohort of educators doing the same work, the M.S.Ed. is where that lives. Learn more about the M.S.Ed.
Want to hear the conversation these five practices came from? Listen to co-founders Dr. Ilana Nankin and Michael Fenchel on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast. They walk through the full Universal Intelligence layer and share where each practice came from.
