A Year 9 student pushes back from her desk. The chair scrapes. She’s told you, loudly, that this task is stupid and she’s not doing it. The whole room turns to look at you.
If you teach, you’ve stood in some version of that moment more times than you can count. And you almost certainly already know what it needs. You’ve done the training. You’ve read the frameworks. You’ve got the language of regulation and connection and repair, maybe through Berry Street, maybe Be You, maybe years of just doing the work.
So this isn’t us telling you something new. Honestly, you’re the experts in that room, not us. What we can offer is the view from the other side of it. At Shine From Within we sit with a lot of these same young people in mentoring circles and workshops, without the marking, the bells or thirty of them at once. It’s a different vantage point on the same kids. And sometimes a different angle on what you already know is the useful thing, especially in a term that’s asking a lot of everyone.
What we notice from where we sit
The thing that comes up again and again in our sessions is how much a young person is carrying that nobody in the room can see. You know this too. But it lands differently when a teen says it out loud to someone who isn’t marking their work.
Mission Australia’s 2025 Youth Survey, which heard from more than 17,000 young people aged 14 to 19, found 39 per cent felt stressed about their mental health and wellbeing, and around one in five scored in the high psychological distress range. School and study sat right near the top of their stressors. So the girl shoving her chair back is often not having a go at you. She’s at the end of something you can’t see the start of. You already suspect that. The data just backs that.
The other thing we’re reminded of constantly is how catching a calm nervous system is. Not in a soft way, in a real one. When a young person is flooded, the thinking part of their brain has stepped back and the survival part has taken the wheel. Dr Bruce Perry’s sequence, regulate then relate then reason, is probably on a poster in your staffroom. It holds up because it’s true. You can’t reason with a nervous system that isn’t ready to be reasoned with. And the fastest way to help theirs settle is to lend them yours.
None of that is new. What we see, in a setting with a bit more room in it, is how quickly a teen softens when the adult in front of them is genuinely steady. It’s a good reminder of how much power there is in something as small as your own out-breath, on the days the job makes that hard to find.
A few things we come back to
You’ll have your own version of most of this. Take what’s useful, leave what isn’t.
We (try to) come back to our own bodies first. Before a word, dropping the shoulders, slowing the exhale. It’s easy to know this and still forget it at 2pm on a Thursday. A teen reads your state before your sentence, so the calm has to be real, not performed.
We come back to getting lower, not bigger. Crouching, sitting alongside, taking a half step back. You do this instinctively with the ones you know well. It’s the harder days, and the kids who push hardest, where it’s easy to draw up to full height instead.
We come back to fewer words. When someone’s flooded, more talking floods them further. “I’m here.” “Take your time.” “You’re not in trouble.” You know this. It’s just genuinely hard to hold your tongue when a room is watching and you’re activated too.
We come back to naming the feeling without judging it. “This feels really big right now” does something that “why are you being like this” never will. And we come back to the repair afterwards, because the thing these kids remember isn’t the adult who never lost their cool. It’s the one who came back, sorted it out and stayed. You are almost certainly already that adult for someone.
We say all this not because you don’t know it, but because knowing it and being resourced to do it on a full and tired day are two very different things.
Which is really about you
Here’s the part that gets skipped. Your regulated nervous system is the tool. That’s the whole mechanism. Which means your own wellbeing isn’t a nice extra tacked onto the job, it is the job, in a fairly literal sense.
We know you’ve heard “look after yourself” until it’s lost all meaning. So we’ll put it plainly instead. The ten minutes between classes, the walk after work, the colleague you debrief with, the boundary you actually hold on your own time. That’s not you falling short of the role. That’s you keeping the one instrument the role depends on in tune. Schools are quick to ask teachers to hold everyone else and slow to ask who’s holding them. It’s worth saying that out loud.
Where Shine fits, if it’s useful
We built our Shine on the Inside curriculum to take some of this off your shoulders. Not to teach you regulation and connection, you’ve got that, but to give you ready-to-run wellbeing lessons so that you can share it with your own students and model it at the same time. So you have the tools to really support your students with wellbeing, without having to create it from scratch.
Our mid-year offer on the curriculum is open until the end of August. If it’s helpful, have a look at what’s inside on the Shine on the Inside page and see whether it fits your students this year. And if it’s not the right thing right now, no pressure at all. You know your room better than anyone.
Thanks for the work you do in the moments no one else sees. We just get the quieter version of the same kids, and we’re glad they’ve got you in the loud one.
