Classrooms Where Students and Teachers Thrive with Emily Daniels

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener
We’re in episode three of season three. Today we’re going to be talking with Emily Daniels of The Regulated Classroom. We’ll be continuing the theme of season three, which is about belonging and what it means to feel at home here. Emily does a lot of work with this question in classrooms and school environments. What does that mean to create a school environment where people feel safe and relaxed in their bodies so they can be learning and co-creating and contributing to a healthy classroom environment, both for the teachers and the students?

In this season’s first couple episodes, we’ve been exploring this theme so far. In the first episode with Bruce Nayowith, we were looking at how do we create group experiences where people feel at home and coming out of separation into healthy relationships. We’ve been talking about the role of trauma, the past harms that are still in our bodies or the system. Bruce mentioned that trauma can cause like excessive rigidity or excessive chaos, and that shows up in group spaces. One of the things that helps us heal trauma, and prevent it, is healthy social attachment, healthy environments where people can feel warmth, resonance and safety and they’re safe to be themselves.

In episode two with Ria Baeck, a facilitator and an author of a book and a website called Collective Presencing, we looked at how do this applies with teams and change makers working together. How can create high trust groups with high degrees of safety, and what then becomes possible when we’re fully present together. That was a great conversation.
I was excited today to then bring it to classrooms, in schools because a lot of people spend their days in those spaces and they affect everybody. That’s been Emily Daniels’ work and you’re going to hear her story today. I want to welcome you, Emily.

Emily Daniels
Thank you Beth. I’m so excited to be here and have this conversation with you today.

Beth Tener
Emily and I met when you were doing your MBA, you shadowed some of our work. You wanted to learn about collaboration and networks, and then we kind of lost touch. I was at a conference around trauma-informed work, and there you were across the room and we’re like, “Hey, we’ve got to connect.” In the time since I had seen you had taken the trauma science and made that central in your work. So that’s what we’re going to delve into today.
The way I see and understand what you’re doing now, Emily, is that you’re about “how do we make classroom environments that are good for learning?” Is that a good way to describe it?

Emily Daniels
It’s actually, it’s perfect, Beth, because what we now understand is that is the starting point, and it’s funny because it’s not just for classrooms. It’s true for all human settings really, right? There is this need for felt safety in order to enable and optimize conditions for connection and ultimately for reaching the brain’s higher capacities.

Beth Tener
Yeah. And that idea that if we don’t feel safe, if we’re on edge, we’re anxious, we’re not in a good place to be learning and absorbing things well.

Emily Daniels
Yes and that’s what I’m trying to help educators with.

Beth Tener
Can you tell us about your current work under your organization called The Regulated Classroom? How is your approach different than traditional programs in schools?

Emily Daniels
The primary difference is that it’s a somatic perspective. Everything else I had ever been trained in about how to bring about classroom management, if you will, or how to encourage the acquisition of academic skills was very cognitive in nature and/or behavioral or both. The emphasis was on thinking clearly and controlling impulses. The idea was that the teachers had to be deliberate in how they explicitly taught certain skills. And if you did that well enough, then students would be able to acquire that skill.
Unfortunately, that paradigm hasn’t really held up. We’ve spent the better part of 20 years with No Child Left Behind trying to improve instructional practices and yet we’re in a complete plateau in terms of gains,

academically speaking. So now this somatic field of psychology is helping us understand there’s another major variable at play here that needs attention. And what I love about it is that it helps us to move from this focus on just the individual student to actually taking a step back and recognizing the dynamics that are alive in the whole. When I was listening to your other podcast interviews, I’m just like, “Yes! This is what we’re talking about. This is what we’re working with.”

Beth Tener
Love it. So the whole classroom and the interactions of people around the student affect their ability to be there, learn and “behave.”

Emily Daniels
Regulation is not an individual experience, meaning it’s a phenomenon that occurs individually, of course your nervous system functions individually, but it’s very much impacted by what’s around you. So the people in your context and the environment itself impacts how we feel on the inside of our bodies. Delving into the studies of trauma and resilience is what helped me recognize that and synthesize it with my own personal and professional experiences.

Beth Tener
What is The Regulated Classroom about?

Emily Daniels
I share a model or a framework (depends on how you like to think about it) to help teachers understand these specific qualities of experience that are likely to encourage an experience of felt safety or a regulated state in the nervous system. There are four kinds of experiences that I’ve identified: connectors, activators, settlers, affirmations. I’ve collected these from the science and categorized them. There’s all this literature out there about what helps people feel safe and what helps the body to be more integrated and organized. I never found that it existed in one place as a resource.

Beth Tener
You’re a translator.

Emily Daniels
Yeah, exactly. I love that.

Beth Tener
And bringing it across into practice. Which is what Living Love is about.

Emily Daniels
Exactly. I love being in that space and taking what we understand in the field of psychology and being able to build that bridge into education because they are so intertwined. Up to this point, they really haven’t bee, in terms of application.

Beth Tener
You’re doing workshops with teachers, right? I know you’re doing keynotes and stuff too, but your main thing is trainings for teachers?

Emily Daniels
Yes, that’s correct. School districts and/or states hire me to provide professional development to teachers in the framework, mainly because we have such a crisis of educator burnout and overwhelm. The teachers are deeply affected by the conditions they’ve been living through in their work, and it makes it hard for them to show up as safe, present, attuned adults for our students. Our kids so desperately need that right now.

Beth Tener
Could you share some current project you’re working on, that you’re excited about?

Emily Daniels
I’m experiencing the good fortune of having an expanded and extended statewide contract with the Maine Department of Education. And in fall of 2023, I was approached by Pender Macon, though I had approached them, but I heard from Pender Macon that they wanted to move forward with bringing The Regulated Classroom to their educators. What’s so beautiful about that is Pender is a commissioner who has committed herself to what she calls “Humaning Education.” So instead of allowing education to be dictated by an urgency of outcomes… this is her language… she wants instead for education to be influenced and shaped by what is needed, what is best for humans in these experiences or in this environment. She’s just a very conscientious leader.

Beth Tener
That’s amazing! She’s a commissioner of education.

Emily Daniels
She’s amazing, she’s remarkable. And what I’ve had the good fortune of experiencing, because I don’t really work much with Pender, but I work with her visionaries. She has a strong vision for what she wants in the state of Maine. They just recently published a website called Holding the Whole Child or Supporting the Whole Child Post-Covid.
The Regulated Classroom is featured in there, but it’s all these different things that the state is doing to try and really help our systems recover from the pandemic because it has been a form of collective trauma. I’ve had the good fortune of working with the team under Pender in the Office of Student Supports. They are incredible women who are passionate about what’s best for the adults and what’s best for students. These are people that are willing to just open doors that have been long closed or find creative ways around barriers in bureaucracies. It’s been remarkable. I mean, truly remarkable.
In the fall I trained 600 trainers and they expanded that to another 600 in 2024, and we’ve also started and are co-creating and co-leading a community of practice to help people with support and implementation and sustainability with the model and with the framework. It’s created this tremendous momentum. People are excited on a daily basis. People reach out and say, “this is the most hopeful thing I’ve done in education in 30 years.” No lie. They’re so excited about it – it’s been heartening. I’m so happy that what I can share is making a difference and so happy that what they’re learning and bringing back is making a difference. And that’s really what we need in education right now… Is to feel like we can get unstuck. We can unstick ourselves.

Beth Tener
It’s wonderful to hear about the work you’re doing and how it’s growing!
What I’d like to do now is actually go back earlier in your story. We heard you talking about a shift of paradigms – realizing the importance of this other variable of, “wait, what’s happening in our nervous systems, in our bodies affects learning.” I wanted to bring in this idea of paradigm shifts. I learned this from Donella Meadows, who was a great systems thinker. She shared the work of Thomas Kuhn, who studied paradigms, meaning the mindsets that we look through. What he studied was how those shift over time. He said that we have to have repeated experiences of the paradigm we’re in just not working for us to eventually let it go and be willing to try something else.
I know there’s more of the backstory of where that started to happen for you. So let’s go back in your story to the seeds of this. You were a school counselor. Can you tell us about the environment you were working in and I know you had a shift of paradigms. We have to have repeated experiences of it not working, for us to finally go, “oh, I’m willing to open my eyes to try something else.” I’d love to hear your story through that kind of frame.

Emily Daniels
I was a school counselor and I actually started my career in inner city Wilmington, Delaware when I worked in the projects. I started there even before I finished my graduate work. I just wanted to jump right in and really support students that I saw as being vulnerable. I had no idea what that really meant because I didn’t understand what survival does to a human being and what that does to your development.
I was determined to make a difference for those students in their school environment. So I dug right in and tried to find every single program that I could, the concepts of like emotional intelligence were just emerging because this was at the beginning of the 2000s and Daniel Goleman’s work Emotional Intelligence was one of the first books ever written about the neuroscience that at the time was helping us start to understand that when the brain and body are in different states, it’s hard to access rational thought. I was desperate at the time to try to find programs that would increase empathy and increase conscious decision making and impulse control. I though these kids really need help with this stuff because they were chucking chairs at each other. They were getting into fist fights, and they were out of control. I did a lot of early work in what is now called SEL or Social Emotional Learning and got my hands on a lot of different programs and used them and they largely were ineffective. I won’t necessarily mentione by name what those programs were. But I went on to get trained in a lot of different things and they just weren’t working…. I mean they were working. So here’s the truth: they did make a difference for the kids who didn’t need help.

Beth Tener
Okay.

Emily Daniels
Does that make sense?

Beth Tener
That’s a pretty low bar.

Emily Daniels
So it’s like the students who are already pretty mature for their age and sort of cognitively intact. They did great with some of these programs. It extended their ability to think more consciously or to control themselves more. But for the students who actually needed this sort of benefit, it didn’t make any meaningful difference really.
I had spent years, and I do mean years, trying to help children and teens have emotional vocabulary. I was really someone who believed that if they could name what they were feeling that they could, you know, “you name it to tame it.” But I just saw that that was just a total failure over and over again. Not, and not just for the kids, but for myself too personally.

Beth Tener
Just frustrating.

Emily Daniels
My last charge in schools was when I worked as a student assistance counselor with students. I provided individual and group counseling to kids who were referred to me because of issues with substance misuse or chronic misbehavior, absenteeism and that kind of thing. They were teenagers. And in particular, I was working in 2013 with a lot of students who were struggling with misusing pills. I noticed that when I would work with students, they would tell me just these horrific stories about what they were living through. I would constantly be hearing the word trauma. And so I was like, “what’s this trauma thing?” People would say, “oh, well that’s the trauma” when I’d talk to mental health counselors or whatnot. I finally went to a conference in 2016 is hosted every year by Bessel VanDerKolk in Boston. The Body Keeps Score is his work.

On the first day of the conference, I went to a pre-workshop session with Dr. Peter Levine. I sat in the front row and I had my notebook and I was ready. And he’s a dynamic presenter. He said, “what drives behavior is your somatic experience.” And that was my light bulb moment. Because what he went on to say, is “your somatic experience is that lump in your throat, that crushing sensation of weight in your chest, that clench in your belly when you are suffering in a moment. You’re either suffering with sadness or anxiety or whatnot. And you can literally feel those visceral experiences.” That is your somatic experience and that is what is driving how you’re behaving in a moment.

You know, and I tell this story often, but it’s true. I just started crying. I had such a strong emotional response to his description because he was naming something no one had ever talked about. And it was something that I had noticed myself that, I would have these very powerful, visceral experiences from different contexts or different lived experiences. And I never had any language, you know? Here I’d spent all these years trying to teach kids about emotional granularity of “oh, were you feeling envy? Or were you experiencing sadness or was it grief? Or was it, loss or what was that?” But nobody had ever actually named the somatic experience…

Beth Tener
What was happening in the body.

Emily Daniels
Yeah. What was happening in your body. And that was a light bulb moment for me because I just felt like, “yeah, that makes sense. That is why you can’t always override what you are feeling in a moment with a conscious thought because those visceral experiences can be so incredibly powerful. They overtake you or they immobilize you in a moment.”

Beth Tener
So can you walk us through the basic of Polyvagal Theory? I know this sounds like a big name, but it’s like the next step of I think what you’re talking about, which is the fight-flight-freeze. Like what’s happening in our bodies. It is sort of primary to what happens versus what’s happening in our thinking, conscious mind.

Emily Daniels
Yes, exactly. So what I ended up learning from Dr. Levine, because I went on to do his training and somatic experiencing, is that his work is rooted in Polyvagal Theory, which is what you’re talking about. It’s really quite revolutionary… Dr. Steven Porges’s theory about how our autonomic nervous system, which is the system in our body that sustains life. It regulates our breathing and our digestion and our heart rate and all of those kind of things. That system is also responsible for implicit reactions that come about when we don’t feel safe.

We’ve been evolving for thousands upon thousands of years. We really take for granted the relative safety that we experience right now in our current context because humans haven’t lived as we live now for very long; meaning as a species, we’re very accustomed to having our life be threatened on a regular basis. These kinds of threats that we can experience moment to moment changes our physiological state, our nervous system state. There are many times, even throughout the course of a day where our state may be more shifted towards protection and not connection. There are times when it’s very hard for us to actually relate and to be social with other humans. That’s revolutionary in my opinion, because I had been trained in this idea that you are always capable of making a better choice, making the right choice in terms of your behavior.

Beth Tener
Like the carrots and the sticks and the sticker star charts – this behavioral way to motivate people that focuses on the right consequences and punishments.

Emily Daniels
Exactly.

Beth Tener
What are the implications of this understanding how our nervous systems work?

Emily Daniels
When you start to apply this Polyvagal Theory to behavior, you start to see that there are oftentimes things that are occurring that disable the body from being able to access the thinking brain. What I mean by that, and this is especially true for developing children, but it’s true for us as adults as well. There can be moments throughout the day where we can’t think straight, literally, we can’t think consciously about the circumstance and make the “right” choice, and that’s because our physiology can be essentially enabled to be more revved up, to be more protective.

Beth Tener
Like fight-flight.

Emily Daniels
Yeah, exactly in fight, flight or dropped into freeze.

Beth Tener
The way I talked about it with Bruce is, you’re in healthy social engagement… that’s where you might start, and then you can get sort of triggered out of that into another state. Is that…

Emily Daniels
Right. So what that is in Polyvagal Theory, Porges identifies essentially three primary circuits or primary states in the body’s nervous system. A state that he identified that had been previously unidentified was this social state. When our physiology is somewhat modulated and regulated, our social capacities are enabled. We can be conscious, we can be compassionate, we can control our impulses, we can apply our verbal filter. That’s our ventral vagal state, and that’s the state of social engagement.

But then we can get triggered. Porges says this often… we don’t actually have a lot of conscious awareness about the things that might trigger us because they’re sensory in nature. So it can be a certain noise, it can be a kind of movement from another person. It can be a smell. I mean, there’s sensory associations that the body holds onto that are associated with threat. It could be a tone of voice. That’s a big one actually. So you hear a certain tone of voice, you may notice a shift in your body state towards more vigilance like or mobilization, and that’s where you get into the fight or flight. You might start experiencing some anxiety, you may start to feel a level of agitation or frustration because you’ve been triggered. Your body has been now recruited for protection.

One of the things that I talk a lot about in my trainings is another state that Porges just identified called “going dorsal.” This is the one that was not previously in a medical model of stress. So this is what really makes his work very revolutionary. He says that when we experience extreme overwhelm or prolonged overwhelm, we actually go into an immobilized state. We can be here like here in this moment, but we’re not here. We’re not actually present. We’re very dissociated from what’s happening in the moment, and on the inside we feel nothing, we feel numbness.

So these three states; ventral, which is social engagement, dorsal, which is an immobilized state, are actually part of the parasympathetic nervous system. So these are actually two distinct circuits within the settling branch of the body. The other one is mobilization or sympathetic charge, which is we need a certain degree of mobilization to get things done. But if we get triggered then that mobilization actually shuts the body down from being able to access those capacities that make us uniquely human.

Beth Tener
Okay.

Emily Daniels
I mean, I know it’s a lot, but it’s really like, “wow, this kind of explains things, explains why I have difficulty with being the way I want to be in challenging circumstances.” For example, you had those moments where you’re like, “why couldn’t I have just said the right thing?” Or “why couldn’t I have just controlled myself?” It’s like, well you’re in a challenging circumstance…

Beth Tener
When you taught this stuff to me, what I got was that there is stuff happening in your body unconsciously. Your body’s trying to keep you safe, with the whole system. Bruce, in the previous episode, said either it’s oriented towards protection or it’s oriented towards creativity and connection. If we don’t tend to the safety of the environment, then you have all these people in different states of being in anxiety or triggered. When you mention overwhelm, you think of schools and classrooms and Covid. The level of overwhelm is enormous for the teachers and the students.

Emily Daniels
Oh, it’s unbelievable. It’s interesting because people hear these sorts of things and they think, “well that doesn’t apply to me.” “What you’re describing, I don’t have that, that doesn’t happen to me.” And then I bring them into a training and the first thing I have them do is circle up and go around to share their names, who they are, and where they come from. The level of anxiety that is reported in a simple introductory circle is high. They start to immediately be like, “oh, this actually is me too.” And you’re like, Yep! And it’s very real, and it’s nothing about you. You’re human, you’re not a failure, or you’re not choosing poorly or that you’re being uncooperative or disobedient. It’s that you’re in a new circumstance with people you don’t know, and circling up is a vulnerable way to be.

So think about what we do in our classrooms. We do this sort of things all the time with our students. We put them on the spot or put them in…

Beth Tener
…in front of their friends not knowing the answer.

Emily Daniels
Oh yeah! They expect them to do and behave in certain ways. And when they don’t, we say things like, “well, I’m sorry you’re not making a better choice.” And we’re not honoring what’s happening for them in that moment that we haven’t made the environment safe.

Beth Tener
Emily, I want to now go to your work. You had this revelation recognized that this is a whole different way to look at interacting with children, young people and adults. Many other programs you realized didn’t make sense now that you understood this. So you then took a leap, right? You got out of the schools and decided, I have to teach this stuff. Can you tell us about that chapter and then how that evolved to Regulated Classroom?

Emily Daniels
I started to apply some of this stuff that I was learning in my school at the time and the incredible resistance was just more than I could take. It basically came from a place of ignorance. People just didn’t know this information, didn’t have access to this knowledge, and so it became apparent to me very quickly this is what I need to do. It was really a calling, honestly. I need to go out and teach educators about how trauma affects this nervous system and how trauma makes us more oriented towards protection versus connection and creativity.

I quit my job. I resigned as a school student assistance counselor, and I started my own firm called Here This Now. People were always asking, what kind of name is that? Well, the antidote to trauma is being present, so I want you to “hear this now” because this is new information but I want you to be “here with me” now. I’m calling you and I’m inviting you to be present with me because that’s how you heal trauma.

I spent the better part of three years doing a lot of training all over the country because at that time the trauma-informed movement was gaining a lot of momentum. This was in 2017. I did basic trainings on adverse childhood experiences and, and trainings called Trauma 101. I was training and teaching educators about how trauma affects the developing body and brain. One of the things that was said to me often at the end of the trainings was like, “Great information. This makes so much sense. Now I understand why my students are the way they are, but what are we supposed to do with this?” And so in 2020, I published in February of 2020. Oh my god…

Beth Tener
What timing!? Right before…

Emily Daniels
Covid exactly. February 18th I launched The Regulated Classroom as a framework to teach teachers about their nervous systems and how to cultivate conditions for felt safety in the classroom from understanding their own nervous systems. And then voila, three weeks later we go into lockdown. I almost didn’t work. Well, I worked, but I lost all of my work for a good chunk of time there.

Beth Tener
You weren’t going to be on the road doing trainings.

Emily Daniels
No, no. Everything went virtual. I made it through that. In 2022, I got a state-wide contract in my home state of New Hampshire to train 2,800 educators in the model that I created. So that’s what I did.

Two years later I started doing in-person professional development again with teachers, occupational therapists, school counselors, and paraprofessionals and all the people that work in schools. I offered two-day in-person train the trainer programs in my framework. The response was remarkable. It was truly remarkable. People were like, “oh my gosh, this is exactly what we need. This is exactly how we’ve been affected by this crisis. You know, our schools are just fraught with trauma, and we need some different way of being.” I went from Here This Now to The Regulated Classroom and then just basically shifted my identity into The Regulated Classroom. People didn’t understand what Heere This Now was.

Beth Tener
You pivoted, then let it go.
I want to reflect in your story, for people wanting to lead this kind of change. You recognized sitting as a school counselor was not in the right seat to make the change from. You had the courage to leave that place because you had the calling that his stuff needs to come in and you felt it’s not going to come through the system where I now sit.

I want to honor your courage to move from there and then to start Here This Now and then shift to Regulated Classroom, following what people were asking for. I’m sure you had all kinds of branding and investment and had to say, all right. Let it go. Reinvent. You had that pivot capacity as a leader. Now you’ve arrived with being hugely in demand and doing these trainings all over the place, but I want to just honor how you were able keep shifting and letting go what wasn’t working.

Emily Daniels
Thank you. You are right. It’s not been easy. There’s been a lot of moments of honestly a lot of pain. It’s something that I’m deeply passionate about. It’s something that feels like my life’s work. It feels like my purpose. It’s not so much even to share the framework as much as it is to give people an experience of felt safety. To cultivate the conditions within a group of people and within an environment to help them feel safe to be who they are and to show up authentically. That is my calling. What I’m challenged with now is how do I help other people do that for other people? Because it’s not just my thing.

Beth Tener
The Emily Magic of One… It’s special.

Emily Daniels
This is all done together and this is something that we need desperately at this juncture in human evolution… to find simple and creative ways to feel safer with one another.

Beth Tener
That’s why I was so excited to have you on this series because you’ve kind of taken it from a theory into the practice. We’re all about that at Living Love, featuring people who’ve actually lived it.
You started to say earlier was that you decided the best thing was to focus on the teachers. They hadn’t gotten a lot of focus in all these programs.
Can you just walk us through what does a typical workshop look like with the teachers?

Emily Daniels
They have no idea what they were getting themselves into. They really don’t. They come in, they’re like, “what is this?” I use the language of inviting them into qualities of experience. That’s a very different paradigm. It’s a very different scheme from what they’ve been trained in. They’ve been trained in what are “best” practices for teaching. In many ways what they’ve been taught isn’t informed by what we now understand about how the body and brain work and about how important it is to feel at home or to feel safe in order to learn.

Beth Tener
So they need to unlearn?

Emily Daniels
Exactly!

Beth Tener
They show up thinking they are here to get this certification in this professional course, right? So I bet you got to work through some of that before you get going.

Emily Daniels
It’s funny – they struggle because they are so accustomed to how professional development’s going to be. They show up with their computers and their phones and they’re expecting to just sit and be lectured at and maybe take notes, but also, not really be present. And I’m just like, “okay, put all that stuff away and then come join me over here in this circle.”
That’s literally how I start with like 50 or 60 educators. I mean, it’s honestly hysterical. But to be honest with you, the very first way that I invite them into an experience is that I give them all a set of rhythm sticks, and I put on a song and I say, “if you can, follow me.” And I start literally tapping to a rhythm. And that’s one of the first things I want them to recognize is just how organizing and unifying getting a rhythm with other people is. You know, there’s a lot of science behind that, but there’s also a lot of ancestry.

Beth Tener
Indigenous…

Emily Daniels
Practice. Yeah!

Beth Tener
Just like drumming circles.

Emily Daniels
It’s so deeply embedded in our body memory. I mean, but it’s so deeply embedded in our body memory. Bruce Perry talks about how it’s embedded in the body memory because it’s how we grow and develop in utero for nine months. We’re regulated by the mother’s heart rate, by the…

Beth Tener
Heartbeat.

Emily Daniels
The heartbeat, that present pattern is just there. And so our body’s association with rhythm and regulation is just a one-on-one.

That’s what I do with them. I invite them into these qualitative experiences and that’s my model. I actually teach them the model by doing the model.
There are four core practices: connectors, activators, settlers affirmations. We do them all together. And I just keep inviting them to reflect: What do you notice? What do you notice? That’s my language.

What’s so beautiful is that, the connectors are play-based. So like we play, and when we first play, I get them to experience a blended state in their nervous system. So they’re experiencing mobilization because it’s play. And so it’s kind of…

Beth Tener
Kind of active.

Emily Daniels
But we do some little competitive things. Some of them are getting defense mobilized because competition has entered into the experience.

Beth Tener
And what does “defense mobilized” mean?

Emily Daniels
They start getting like high levels of agitation and you’ll start seeing people being like, “well, you were cheating. That wasn’t fair.” And we’re literally playing like a thumb grabbing game with a group of adults and people are like yelling at each other. Like, “you didn’t, you grabbed, you grabbed my hand before she finished counting!” And I’m over there dying because I’m just like, “I love this so much.” This is just completely embodied learning.

I hold space for like, “well what are you noticing right now that’s happening in your body?” They’ll be like, “oh, my heart rate is just racing. I feel flushed in my face. I’m like angry.” I’m like, “yeah, that’s your nervous system. Your defense mobilized. This is what competition can do.” I love being able to help them to dial into what’s happening in a moment, and then to apply this thinking to what they would do in the classroom. Suddenly, the light bulbs start going off for them. They’re like, “oh, that’s why some of my students act in this way.” They start to see how their state influences the students they’re with – that’s the biggest thing that I want them to recognize.

Beth Tener
That’s the biggest “aha.” I’ve been learning that emotions can have a contagion. I’ve heard it described as we’re like tuning forks with each other. Sarah Peyton, who is one of my teachers says, if you play a cello and there’s another cello in the room, those strings will vibrate.

Emily Daniels
Yes. Exactly, metaphorically and literally, we are the exact same.

Beth Tener
So the teacher’s nervous state is affecting the whole classroom.

Emily Daniels
A hundred percent.

Beth Tener
Or one student’s…

Emily Daniels
It is. There’s no recognition of this, as we talked about in the beginning of this episode. For years, there’s never been any recognition about the role of the adult in what’s happening for the students. None. Zero. Never acknowledged – it was always a student problem. It was never about what’s happening for me and how am I showing up in this moment. What does my nervous system communicate?

You are the change. You want things to be different for your students. You are the change. And in many ways, you would think they would feel judged by that, but actually they feel so incredibly validated because I say to them, “you’ve adapted in ways that make perfect sense for someone who’s had to survive day in and day out in this current condition, and so you’ve done a beautiful job adapting.” Many educators are showing up pretty dissociated in their work. They’re there, but they’re not really there. I help them understand that that’s normal given the collective trauma we’ve endured with a pandemic and other things that have happened in education, like school shootings and that sort of thing.

Beth Tener
I also think about the disempowerment of the hierarchical structures in teaching. The people in the classroom who know and see what’s needed are have demands rolled down to them and they are not listened to. There’s a level of injustice and charge that teachers have to live with.

Emily Daniels
And this is what we unpack. I like let them go down those rabbit holes of “let’s talk about all the drivers for your collective nervous system states. Let’s talk about what is it to be an educator today?” And even though it brings us into a collective sucky town, that’s what I call it…

Beth Tener
Sucky town. Are we ever going to get out?

Emily Daniels
We do. It’s so fun. We just circle the drain together. It’s so embodied. It’s like, “do you feel that suck? That swirl of hopelessness and despair. We’re never getting out this, we are so stuck.” But then I’ll say, “okay, grab your rhythm sticks. I’m going to throw a song on for 90 seconds. Let’s notice how we feel now.” I’m really teaching them how to modulate the nervous system, the collective nervous system.

Resmaa Manakem is the genius who really first named that. He’s the gentleman who wrote My Grandmother’s Hands and he talks about racialized trauma and how there are things living in our individual and collective nervous systems that are patterns that we have to acknowledge. We have been recognizing for a very long time that there’s a phenomenon that’s occurring within a group and within a system. The training enables these educators to actually experience that firsthand. They get to actually experience the contagion of their nervous system with one another. They begin to understand the power of that.

Beth Tener
Both spiraling towards what you want and spiraling towards what you don’t want.

Emily Daniels
Exactly. I’ve done these trainings now with thousands of people. I’m just on the verge of having 2,000 trainers that I’ve trained in my framework, which is incredible. What I love is that at the end of these two-day train the trainer programs, they all walk away with the same bond. I’m able to replicate the quality of the experience for these folks. It speaks so powerfully to the good fortune that I’ve had to pull together these connectors, activators, settlers, and affirmations. When we experience these practices together with great frequency, then felt safety is established. And when felt safety is established, what humans can feel with one another and accomplish together is unlimited. It’s literally limitless. And it’s exactly the quality of community that people are desperate for, especially in education.

Beth Tener
It’s interesting to hear you talk, Emily, because I’m doing the same work, but in a different context. I don’t call them the same thing, like in opening circle, in a meeting where everyone gets to chime in and say something that’s not always about the content. You are seen, heard, and named. Then we do small groups where they get into storytelling and they look eye to eye with other people. You see their faces smiling and nodding at each other. Connectors. Right? We’re all finding our way to similar practices. I agree, when it’s set up well, when the container of the classroom is well held – where I show up with a calmness and hold the group, we create a group field. People will then act differently in the field.

Emily Daniels
A hundred percent.

Beth Tener
You can design for belonging. You can design for safety if you’re aware of this information.

Emily Daniels
Exactly. And it’s funny you say it that way, Beth, because I don’t talk about it in that way with educators, but that’s a hundred percent what the model is. It’s actually a design for “how do we cultivate conditions for felt safety? What are the variables that we can have control over, that can help us to feel safer with one another.”

In Polyvagal Theory, Porges is very explicit. He talks about relational cues of safety. It’s what you’re describing about seeing people and connecting eye to eye and nodding and being attuned and symmetrical in our body language. You and I are doing this naturally in this conversation and even virtually. So there’s an attunement that’s happening here. And those are the relational cues of safety: like “I am with you, I feel you.” I talk about that a lot in the Train the Trainer program. We work a lot with, what I call somatic listening. It’s basically helping teachers to experience what it is to be present with another person. They’ve never had training like that. That training is usually reserved for clinical folks or people like us. It’s very powerful. It doesn’t come from the words that we say, it comes from all this non-verbal, literal symmetry.

Beth Tener
I’m teaching resonant listening these days. How do you listen and respond in ways that help people feel seen and understood? I learned this approach from Sarah Peyton, if you’re talking with someone who is upset about something and they are going on and on. I can say, “Emily, can you hold on a sec? My heart is really heavy right now, holding what you’re saying. Can you just pause a minute for me to catch up?” Instead of “stop talking!”
If I’m listening and I refer back to my body experience or I name yours… or I could say “when you’re talking about that new possibility, your eyes lit up and you look so light. And when you’re talking about your current job, I just feel this heavy energy.” That’s listening. It is words that say, “I am with you.”. And you feel more real as a person. So much of the conversation in schools is intellectual and cognitive and so focused on the getting the material into the students. It’s not human in its connectedness.

Emily Daniels
No, it’s not. And that’s exactly right, Beth.

It’s great because it is like turning the Titanic. The first little spin of the wheel, if you will… what’s so exciting about it is just to see how much people are hungering for it. How much they’re nourished by it. Then they bring it back and they use it and they’re like, “oh my gosh, that actually works. This is working, I’m doing this with my staff, or I’m doing this with my classroom.” I’m seeing the difference it’s making.

Beth Tener
That is so heartening, isn’t it?

Emily Daniels
It’s, oh yeah. I feel like the most privileged person in the world to be able to do this.

Beth Tener
Well, I’m so glad this was your calling, that the stars aligned for you to be able to bring it forward the way you did. Can you give us like a before and after classroom picture, after people have gone through your training? Like what would look different if the typical way we do it versus a teacher that’s really using your methods?

Emily Daniels
There’s a lot more actual dynamic energy. One of the things that we have defined as a good teacher is having a class full of silent motionless children. If the kids are like basically robotic, that’s been the definition of being good at managing your class and having good classroom management. I would say that in with the Regulated Classroom, what you see is a dynamic community that is ebbing and flowing together. The students are moving in synchrony with one another, rhythm making with one another. They’ll be playing together, they’ll be collectively settling together. So doing things like mindfulness and deep breathing and self-holding and using sensory products that help with settling.

And they’ll also be affirming. Instead of like trying to incentivize the students to do the right thing… the teachers are affirming when they experience a regulated state in their body as a result of what’s happening in the classroom. So saying like, “guys, I just want to share with you right now that I’m noticing that my heart feels heavy with joy because we are doing this so well together right now.” You double down on the cognitive connection between a positive experience in the classroom and what’s happening on the inside of the body.

We’ve learned from the science about how to heal trauma that you’ve got to make new associations in the body. One way to enhance that is to consciously double down on a positive experience in the moment. It’s a fine tuned practice because you don’t want toxic positivity. You don’t want to try to make something positive that’s not. It’s actually taking a moment of authentic joy or authentic safety and consciously pointing that out and sharing that with your students or with your colleagues.

Beth Tener
What I love in that also is that the teacher is naming that the students have affected her or him.

Emily Daniels
Exactly.

Beth Tener
That it’s again, back to like it’s all about the students and the teachers are invisible. Other than setting expectations and critiquing you to follow rules and you know, like it’s just… Yes, we’re humans together, right?

Emily Daniels
Correct. And that’s that little Titanic shift, right? Like, “oh my goodness, we really are challenging a lot about the existing system, but we’re doing it in very subtle, nuanced ways that make it so much more human,” like you said. So much more humanizing and in turn, safer.

Beth Tener
As we’re coming to a close, if people want to learn more about your work, where should they go?

Emily Daniels
I would encourage you to follow us on Instagram. Our Instagram and our Facebook page are very active. Emma Adams works with me and she posts regularly. The posts help deepen people’s understanding of this paradigm shift and how to apply the model that I developed in schools and to stay encouraged with it. It’s a lot of self-compassion stuff too, because I think we’re, we’re hard on ourselves as adults.

We are on the precipice of launching a whole new website, it’s in progress right now. At regulatedclassroom.com, you can find me and my little team there. We’re located here in New Hampshire.

Beth Tener
Love it! Me too.

Emily Daniels
I’ve tried to center most of my work in New England, but I do work across the country, which is also very cool. I have clients in Canada and I’ve worked with clients in Ireland and Australia. It’s gotten some international traction for sure. When I’m not raising a daughter, I will at some point be doing more international travel, but right now I’m trying to just stay focused in New England because that’s where my family is.

Beth Tener
Okay. Well thank you so much Emily. This has been a pleasure. Thank you.

Emily Daniels
Beth, this has been so as it should be… right?

Beth Tener
Next time on episode four, continuing our series about “what it means to feel at home here.” I will get into the dynamics of conflict and how we make decisions at the scale of public dialogue in the political process. How do we bring this experience of safety and connection into those spaces which are often so fraught and tend to be what split us apart? We often don’t feel at home with conflict and tension.

My guest will be Rosa Zubizaretta, who is the author of a book called From Conflict to Creative Collaboration: A User’s Guide to Dynamic Facilitation. Rosa is a wonderful facilitator and thought leader about how the idea of a facilitators creating a climate of mutual respect and psychological safety makes it possible for people to consider creative new solutions and move from their preconceived positions. Bringing this dialogue into how we make collective decisions and work through conflict. I hope you will join us next time.