Twenty-eight years in, Ms. Kepler still gets to her classroom by 6:45 so she has ten minutes to look at the empty desks and remember who sits where. She loves the kids in third period, and third period this year has a student who spent the first week of school staring at her desk, another who hasn’t spoken above a whisper, and two more whose bodies can’t hold still in a chair for eleven minutes at a stretch. The share of U.S. high school students reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness climbed from 30% in 2013 to 40% in 2023, and one in five students in that year’s survey seriously considered attempting suicide (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2013–2023, 2024). Those students walk into Ms. Kepler’s room every morning. Her certification prepared her to teach a subject to a group, and nobody trained her for the humans now sitting in those desks.
That’s the gap under most of what gets called teacher burnout: most teachers who burn out haven’t stopped caring — their preparation stopped four rungs short of the job they’re actually doing.
There’s a name most of us in this field grew up with for what to do about that gap. Buck up. Rub some dirt in it. Keep going. The grit narrative is the profession’s inherited answer to an impossible workload, and it’s easy to write off as a holdover from another time, but that misreads what it actually did. When there was no time in the school day for anything other than instruction, when peer collaboration meant fifteen minutes of small talk at the copier, when there was literally no structural container for what teachers were carrying, “toughen up” was the only self-directed move that fit inside the schedule, and the teachers who kept going did keep going. Grit culture’s real problem is that the job it was built for isn’t the job we have now.
“Buck up, rub some dirt in it, and keep going,” is how one of our veteran teachers described the culture she inherited when she started teaching. “That is the story we tell ourselves, that this is a gritty profession, and we just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and keep marching forward.”
What Teacher Preparation Got Right (And Where It Stopped)
Consider what teacher preparation has actually built up over the last century, rung by rung: content mastery, then general pedagogy, then classroom management with an emphasis on procedures and consequences, and in the last twenty years, social-emotional learning as a curriculum to deliver to students. Each rung was a response to what the previous one couldn’t do, each was necessary, and each stopped at the classroom door of the students who need the next rung.
That next rung lives in the educator herself — the capacity to regulate a nervous system, name an emotion, hold relational safety, and stay connected to why she’s in the room. Everything students are being asked to learn depends on the adult in front of them having those capacities available and named, and the field has treated them as ambient rather than trainable.
At Breathe for Change, we call the whole ladder Human Intelligence, and it has five dimensions: cognitive, emotional, somatic, relational, and universal. Cognitive is the rung the field has climbed for a century. The other four are what teacher preparation, at nearly every institution in the country, has skipped.
The Real Cost of Missing Four Educator Skills
Those rungs weren’t skipped for lack of importance; the field treated them as ambient, as things adults would either bring or lack, as temperament rather than trainable skill. That treatment held up until the students in the room started showing up dysregulated at the rate they show up dysregulated today, and then it collapsed.
Educators feel the collapse in their bodies. Teachers are roughly twice as likely as comparable working adults to report frequent job-related stress or burnout, and about three times as likely to report difficulty coping with that stress (RAND Corporation, State of the American Teacher Survey, 2024). That’s the physiological baseline the average U.S. teacher walks into third period on, and it’s what happens when a person is asked to co-regulate a room of dysregulated children with no training in how to co-regulate, no time in the day to reset, and no professional container to say out loud what they’re actually carrying.
The economic backdrop compounds the strain. The teacher weekly wage penalty hit a record 26.9% in 2024, meaning teachers earned roughly $27 less per $100 earned by similarly educated professionals, and even including benefits the total compensation penalty runs 17.1% (Economic Policy Institute, The Teacher Pay Penalty Reached a Record High in 2024, 2024). Public regard has drifted along with pay: 73% of Americans say teachers are undervalued, and only 40% would recommend teaching as a career to their own child, down from 75% in 1969 (PDK International, Annual Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, 2023). Those are real fights, and no breathing practice closes a wage gap or shrinks a class of thirty-four.
There’s still a distinct piece inside the collapse that’s fixable from inside the teacher’s own practice, and it’s the piece the preparation ladder never finished building.
What Educator Sustainability Actually Requires
Somatic intelligence names the fact that the adult’s nervous system is the classroom’s operating environment. When a teacher spends a full day in what neuroscience calls a state outside the window of tolerance — hyperaroused in fight-or-flight or hypoaroused and shut down — the students in the room register that state and shift toward it, which is a well-documented pattern in the neuroscience of co-regulation. Interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, is what allows a teacher to notice she’s been holding her breath since second period and choose to exhale. Ms. Kepler describes recognizing, fifteen years into teaching, that she had been holding her breath at her desk for most of every school day, and nobody had ever asked her to notice.
Emotional intelligence names the daily reality that educators carry other people’s feelings for a living without a structured release valve or a peer container in which to put them down. “Our teachers don’t have that space innately built into their work days,” Breathe for Change co-founder Dr. Ilana Nankin has said. “And so of course there’s shame, and of course all of that emotional weight then brings you down.” Her doctoral research followed eight equity-oriented educators through their first year of teaching at one of the top-ranked teacher preparation programs in the world, and inside two months most were questioning whether they could stay in the profession — the strain was showing up in the preparation itself.
Relational intelligence names the interpersonal awareness, empathy, and repair capacities that let a teacher stay in a room with a dysregulated child without becoming dysregulated herself. Universal intelligence names the sense of purpose that gets dimmed under chronic stress and reignited when educators reconnect to why they walked into this profession in the first place. All four dimensions are trainable, and none of them were on the syllabus.
Four Practices That Change the Equation
Treat these as professional practices woven into the workday:
- Notice what your nervous system is doing. Interoception is the first educator skill the syllabus skipped, and it lives in small moves — three breaths at a transition, feet on the floor between blocks, a hand on the sternum when a student escalates.
- Name the story running the show. Educators inherit a stream of internal narration about competence and failure that runs through most workdays, and naming the story is what allows a teacher to examine whether it’s actually true and what belongs in its place.
- Build a peer container for the emotional load. Educators are among the only helping professionals expected to metabolize a full day of children’s needs without a structured debrief, and where a school won’t provide one, a small teacher-led circle will do — the circle itself is the intervention.
- Treat these as instructional infrastructure. The capacity to co-regulate a classroom is what makes the lesson accessible; it sits under the lesson plan the way electricity sits under the light switch.
Build These Capacities in a Graduate Program
The William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change, exists to build these four capacities systematically over the course of a graduate degree, alongside the cognitive work the field has always done. The credential matters — it’s HLC-accredited via William Jewell College and moves through 30 graduate credits in 12 months — and the capacities are the actual point. When 20,000+ certified educators have taken the training and 250,000 educators have moved through Breathe for Change programs and reached 20M+ students, what’s emerging is a professional development lane where none existed. When you’re ready to build these capacities systematically, the M.S.Ed. is where that work lives.
At 6:45 tomorrow morning, Ms. Kepler will get to her classroom, and third period will still be third period, and the student under the desk will still be under the desk. What changes is what she brings into the room with her: a nervous system that has learned to exhale, a peer container in which the day’s load gets put down, and a set of capacities her certification never named. The next rung on the ladder is the one that lets her keep doing this work well for the next twenty-eight years.
Want to go deeper? Listen to the full conversation between Dr. Ilana Nankin and Beth Schreiber on the Breathe for Change podcast. They cover the preparation gap, the science of co-regulation, and the six-week peer practice group that flipped one school’s stress and satisfaction curves.
