A reflection on a day of learning, honesty, and the quiet courage it takes to teach with your whole self.
What does it take to truly teach? Not just to deliver a lesson, but to be present, steady, and kind in a room full of young lives that need exactly that.
Tergar Schools brought two researchers into the room to sit with exactly this question. What followed was a day of professional development unlike most: one that moved between brain science and inner life, between data and lived experience, and that left teachers with something more than new strategies. It left them feeling seen.
The Emotional Brain
Robin Nusslock, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, opened the day with a framework that gave language to something teachers already sense: emotion is not a distraction from learning. It is the very ground from which learning either takes root.
Using brain imaging research, Nusslock described four regions central to how we experience our inner world: the prefrontal cortex, which governs self-regulation; the amygdala, which registers threat; the ventral striatum, which responds to reward; and the insula, which connects us to what the body is feeling from moment to moment.
For teachers, this was not abstract anatomy. These are the systems quietly running in every child who walks through the door. A child whose amygdala is on high alert — primed by stress, instability, or trauma — is a child whose capacity to learn is already compromised before a single lesson begins. Creating a sense of safety is not separate from teaching. It is teaching.
What made Nusslock’s session particularly alive was his honesty about the limits of his own field. When one of the teachers asked how a feeling actually arises in the brain, he paused. “That’s a complicated question,” he said, and then acknowledged something striking neuroscience cannot yet say with certainty that the mind originates in the brain. For a room full of teachers who work within a contemplative tradition, this openness felt like a meeting point rather than a gap. Some of the deepest questions about the nature of mind have been held by Buddhist thinkers for centuries. Science, it turns out, is arriving at the same edges.
We Teach Who We Are
Robert W. Roeser, who holds the Alice Valli Professorship in Compassion at Emory University’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-based Ethics, took the afternoon in a more personal direction.
He began by naming what teacher training typically covers: knowledge of subject matter, understanding of child development, and skill in pedagogy. These matter. But something essential, he has found, is almost always missing.
He shared a reflection from his student: “You taught us how to be experts in our subject matters, in our understanding of our students’ development, and in our teaching strategies — but you never really taught us skills for how to ‘just be ourselves’ in our role as teacher.” — Matt, Stanford Teacher Education Program, 2004
Roeser calls this the fourth domain: teacher professional identity. He returned, again, to a line from educator Parker J. Palmer that carries the weight of long experience: “We teach who we are.”
A curious teacher teaches curiosity. A kind teacher teaches kindness, not through a lesson plan, but through the quality of their presence. The way a teacher moves through difficulty, holds a mistake, offers attention, these become, quietly and inevitably, part of what students learn about what it means to be human.
For the teachers in the room, this landed somewhere real. They are not just delivering content. They are, in every moment, modeling a way of being.
Roeser’s framework for teacher wellbeing centers on three qualities he believes can be cultivated: to be calm under stress, clear in attention and perception, and kind, toward students, and toward themselves. Not as ideals to perform, but as inner capacities to grow.
Questions From the Floor
The conversation opened into something rich when teachers began to ask questions.
One teacher asked whether the mind is simply a product of the brain. Nusslock was direct: science doesn’t have that answer yet. The teachers responded with appreciation as they too had held this ripe agnosticism in their own practice. Another question touched something many teachers recognize but rarely name: attention spans are shrinking. Children are more distracted. What do we do?
Nusslock offered something he had heard from Mingyur Rinpoche that reframed the problem entirely: the importance of learning how to be bored. Boredom, far from being a failure of engagement, can be the beginning of genuine curiosity. The question isn’t how to fill every moment it’s how to create space for a child’s own wondering to emerge.
On the question of how to support children through anxiety and panic in the classroom, both speakers were grounding and practical. The first step, they agreed, is creating an environment where it is safe to feel, where a racing heart and sweaty palms don’t have to mean catastrophe. Breathing techniques, body awareness, gentle touch, the same tools that regulate the nervous system of an adult, work for children too. And modeling matters: if teachers can show, by their own example, that difficulty can be met with steadiness rather than alarm, they offer students something no curriculum can.
A Shared Question
“What struck me was not just the quality of the research, but the quality of the conversation, scientists and educators sitting together with a genuine openness to what they don’t yet know. A neuroscientist acknowledging that the deepest questions about mind remain open. A teacher development researcher pointing back, again and again, to the inner life of the person standing at the front of the room.”
Dr. Justin Kelley, Executive Director, Tergar Schools
This is something Tergar Schools has long believed: education is not only about the transfer of information. It is about offering students the conditions, relationships and practices through which their own inmate capacities, for awareness, resilience, and genuine kindness, can come alive. What these two researchers offered, with warmth, rigor, and real humility, was a scientific framework that points in the same direction.
The brain is not a fixed machine. The teacher is not a delivery system. And the child in front of us is not a problem to be solved — but a person, waiting to be met.
With Gratitude
Tergar Schools is deeply grateful to Robin Nusslock and Robert W. Roeser for giving so generously of their time, research, and wisdom.
We are also grateful to Park Krausen, Director of Frontiers of the Mind Film, The 100 Year Project, for joining us and sharing her work, a powerful reminder that the conversation between contemplative wisdom and modern science is unfolding in many places, and that Tergar Schools is part of something much larger.
