We start at the source of all stability in teaching (and at the base of the self-healing cycle) -- grounding into one's core competences. This first session helps new teachers learn how to respond from alignment rather than urgency. Teaching is a calling rooted in care and relationship, yet without this inner alignment, that same care can quickly lead to depletion and burnout.

​

Rooted in Korthagen’s Core Reflection approach, this session emphasizes that lasting professional growth begins from the inside out. Rather than focusing only on skills or behaviors, Core Reflection helps educators surface and align their inner drivers, identity, mission, values, and strengths, so that external practice flows naturally from inner coherence.

​

This session supports early-career educators in identifying their core teaching competencies, values, and “why,” laying the foundation for grounded decision-making, self-healing, and sustainable practice. Participants explore the difference between slow burn and burnout, learning how aligned action fuels steady energy, clarity, and motivation over time.

​

STRATEGY TAKE-AWAY: Create your "Anchor Before Action" Plan

Teaching places constant and often invisible demands on the nervous system. These demands are especially intense in the early years of the profession. This session introduces new teachers to the basics of nervous system functioning so they can understand how stress shows up in their bodies, thoughts, emotions, and behavior, and learn how to respond early, before stress compounds into burnout or compassion fatigue.

​

Participants learn to recognize their personal stress appraisal patterns and how the nervous system moves through fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses. With this awareness, new teachers develop practical strategies to restore balance, regulate stress, and return to a state of flow during the school day to protect both their energy and effectiveness in the classroom.

​

This session also helps new teachers learn how to notice nervous system cues in students, such as escalation, withdrawal, shutdown, or people-pleasing, and respond in ways that support regulation rather than react to behavior. As educators learn to create internal safety for themselves, they strengthen their ability to remain grounded, responsive, and emotionally present and lay the foundation for sustainable teaching and classroom environments where students feel safe, supported, and able to access their "learning brain" state.

​

STRATEGY TAKE-AWAY: Get Back Into the Groove Action Steps

The early years of teaching place new educators in constant contact with stress as they learn to manage classroom demands, relationships, and professional expectations all at once. This session reframes burnout and compassion fatigue as protective signals rather than personal failures while learning the difference between safe and toxic stress, explore the 4 E’s of the stress and trauma response, and develop skills for recognizing early signs of burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress in themselves and their students.

​

Using CASEL’s five SEL competencies, self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making, new teachers learn that they are the primary SEL intervention in the classroom. Rather than suppressing stress, educators learn how to metabolize it through their own regulation, reflection, and relational choices.

As they practice moving stress through their own bodies and experiences, they simultaneously strengthen core teaching dispositions of emotional regulation, reflective practice, relational attunement, and ethical decision-making. As teachers embody these competencies in real time, they support their own well-being and professional growth while making social-emotional learning visible, teachable, and transferable for students through their daily presence and responses.​

​

STRATEGY TAKE-AWAY: The H.E.A.L. Path to Completing the Stress Cycle

This session supports new teachers in learning the foundational skills of co-regulation and relational attunement, essential dispositions for creating safe, healing, and supportive classroom relationships.

​

Through guided practice, new teachers develop relationship-centered strategies for co-regulating from a place of flow rather than reactivity. As teachers learn how to regulate themselves first, they strengthen their ability to stabilize the classroom climate and respond with clarity instead of urgency and compassion instead of criticality. 

​

Participants learn how to recognize when they, and their students, have moved into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, and how to intentionally return to the social engagement zone, where connection, learning, and collaboration are possible.

​

Grounded in healing-centered engagement, this session emphasizes the “what happened to you?” perspective, cultivating core teaching dispositions of empathy, curiosity, and reflective practice.

​

STRATEGY TAKE-AWAY: Signal Before Solution - 3 Step Co-Regulation Strategy

In the early years of teaching, sustainable classroom rituals and routines are essential for student behavior and learning and new teacher well-being and longevity. This session supports new teachers in learning how to design and facilitate restorative, relationship-centered rituals and routines rooted in SEL practices that create emotional safety, predictability, and belonging without adding to overwhelm.

​

This session introduces the foundational elements of restorative practice circles, including establishing emotional safety, co-creating shared norms, modeling reflective listening, and using compassion-centered language that supports voice, accountability, and repair. Participants learn how social-emotional learning instruction is naturally embedded within these rituals and routines, allowing students to practice regulation, empathy, communication, and responsible decision-making in real time rather than as a separate curriculum.

​

New teachers leave with practical strategies for embedding restorative rituals and routines such as check-ins, transitions, community circles, and repair conversations into daily classroom life.

​

STRATEGY TAKE-AWAY: Restore Before You Repair Pause

This session helps new teachers understand how their calm, regulated Presence is one of the most powerful tools they have for shaping classroom climate and supporting student learning.

Drawing on the science of relational attunement, educators learn how small shifts in Presence, tone, timing, and response help students feel emotionally safe and regulated since these conditions that make learning possible. When teachers remain grounded, students borrow that calm. Behavior softens, trust grows, and curiosity returns, allowing moments of challenge to become moments of teaching rather than disruption.

​

This session highlights how a new teacher's calm Presence precedes instruction. When students feel safe, instruction lands. Participants learn how to recognize micro-moments throughout the school day, during transitions, corrections, and check-ins, and use simple relational practices to turn these moments into opportunities for regulation, connection, and engaged learning.

​​

STRATEGY TAKE-AWAY: The 10 Second Shift to Create the Teachable Moment

​