Despite growing evidence that teacher emotional regulation significantly influences student achievement, engagement, and wellbeing, allied health recommendations in schools remain largely focused on individual children, with limited attention to the classroom system in which they learn. Drawing on educational psychology, developmental science, and school consultation research, this paper argues for a reframing of teacher self-regulation as a structural feature of the learning environment rather than an issue of individual disposition or staff wellbeing alone. Three key claims are advanced: (1) teacher self-regulation has demonstrable effects on student outcomes; (2) external professionals, including occupational therapists, typically operate as peripheral, time-limited participants within complex classroom systems, limiting the validity and sustainability of recommendations that overlook contextual factors; and (3) effective clinical practice should incorporate the regulatory needs of educators alongside child-focused intervention. The paper concludes by considering the practical implications of this perspective, including greater investment in supporting teacher regulation and a more collaborative, systems-aware approach from external professionals working within educational settings.
Teachers are the experts in the room.
They spend more waking hours with the children on their caseloads than most of us ever will, and they do it with a level of attunement that deserves far more recognition than it gets. They know which child needs five quiet minutes before they can engage, which one needs to move before they can sit, which one is carrying something heavy from home that morning — often before that child has said a single word. They read rooms in ways that take years to develop and that no report, however thorough, can fully capture. We are continually grateful for this, even when we forget to say so.
I say this because what follows is a reflection on a blind spot I think many of us in allied health carry — and I want to name clearly upfront that it isn’t a criticism of teachers. If anything, it’s the opposite: an attempt to truly see and honour everything teachers are already holding, much of it invisibly.
What our reports don’t account for
When an occupational therapist writes a sensory report, the focus is almost always — understandably — on the individual child. We observe, we assess, we make recommendations with the best of intentions: reduce visual clutter, offer movement breaks, consider seating near the front, away from the window, away from the door.
These are reasonable, evidence-based recommendations, and we offer them with genuine care. But they land in a system far richer and more demanding than any single report can address.
That system is a room containing twenty or thirty nervous systems — each with its own regulatory needs, each quietly influencing the others. And at the centre of it, holding the whole thing together with remarkable steadiness, is a human being with a nervous system too.
The research on this is clear and, frankly, underappreciated in our field.
Jennings and Greenberg’s widely cited 2009 review in the Review of Educational Research established that teacher social and emotional competence — including the capacity to manage their own emotional states — is foundational to supportive classroom relationships, effective management, and positive student outcomes [1]. This wasn’t a marginal finding. It positioned teacher wellbeing not as a nice-to-have, but as a structural feature of learning environments — one worth treating with real respect.
A large-scale study by Klusmann, Richter, and Lüdtke (2016), drawing on data from over 1,000 elementary school teachers and their students, found that teacher emotional exhaustion was significantly and negatively associated with student achievement in mathematics — even after controlling for class composition, student socioeconomic status, and cognitive ability [2]. The effect held. A teacher’s internal state was a measurable variable in student outcomes — which is exactly why protecting that internal state matters so much.
A systematic review by Madigan and Kim (2021) confirmed the pattern across multiple studies: teacher burnout is associated with lower student reading ability, lower maths scores, and reduced literacy growth over time [3].
Guests in someone else’s ecosystem
There is something else our reports rarely account for, and it has less to do with the individual teacher than it does with us.
When an OT, a speech pathologist, a behaviour consultant, or any other external agent of change walks into a school, we are — almost always — guests. We might spend forty-five minutes in a classroom once a term. We see one lesson, one moment, on one day, inside a system that runs for six or seven hours a day, every day, across forty weeks of the year. We don’t see what happened at recess. We don’t see the parent email that landed at 7am. We don’t see the staffing shortage, the fire drill that ate into the literacy block, or the colleague on leave whose students have just been folded into an already full room.
Schools are extraordinarily complex, adaptive ecosystems — closer to a living organism than a machine. They run on relationships, routines, institutional memory, and a thousand small daily adjustments that no outside visitor could ever fully map, let alone redesign from a single observation. Inside that ecosystem, the classroom teacher is a constant: present every day, carrying context across time, absorbing and adapting to changes the rest of us will never witness. We, by contrast, are peripheral to it — and we say that with real respect, not apology. It is simply the nature of the role we hold, and it is worth us naming honestly.
This matters because it should change what we expect of our own recommendations. The research on consultation models in schools tells a sobering story: even when external consultants provide well-designed, evidence-based intervention plans, most teacher-consultees are unable to sustain implementation with fidelity for more than a couple of weeks without ongoing, in-context support [7]. This is not a reflection of teacher commitment — if anything, it is the opposite. It reflects how demanding it is to layer a new practice onto an already overflowing system, with no one inside that system helping to carry it day to day.
Recognising these limitations calls for a more measured and humble approach. A report handed over and walked away from is not really a solution; it is a hope, placed carefully into someone else’s already full hands. The more we appreciate our own peripheral position with love rather than defensiveness, the more thoughtfully — and more humbly — we can choose what we ask of the people who are actually living inside the system, every single day, long after we’ve gone home.
The invisible cord between teacher and student
There is something harder to measure — but no less real, and no less worth honouring — sitting underneath those statistics.
Children don’t regulate themselves in isolation. Decades of developmental research have established that regulation is, first and foremost, a relational process. Infants and young children develop the capacity to manage their emotional and physiological states through repeated experiences of co-regulation with an attuned adult: someone whose own nervous system is calm enough to offer a kind of neurological scaffolding [4].
This process doesn’t stop at school entry.
It’s worth being precise here, because teachers are rightly critical of pop neuroscience. The theoretical framework most often cited in this space — polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges — has generated significant clinical interest but also legitimate scientific debate about some of its specific claims [5]. What is well-established, and does not depend on any single theory, is this: emotional states are contagious in social environments. Children are exquisitely attuned to the affective tone of the adults around them. A teacher’s regulated, warm presence is not just a relational quality — it is a feature of the learning environment, as real and as valuable as lighting or acoustics.
Sutton and Wheatley’s review of teacher emotion research noted that students appear particularly responsive to the emotional cues of their teachers, with downstream effects on engagement and behaviour [6]. Madigan and Kim describe this as a potential “contagion effect” — burnout passing from teacher to student through emotional transmission [3].
This is not to place the burden of children’s regulation on individual teachers. It is to say that the classroom is not a neutral container. It is a relational field, and the person with the most power to shape that field — gently, often invisibly — is the adult at the front of the room.
Which means that when we write recommendations for a child without ever asking about the teacher, we are missing something important — and missing a chance to genuinely help.
The teacher we don’t see in the report
Think about the last classroom you walked into for an observation, and the person you found already there, holding it together long before you arrived.
There may have been a newly qualified teacher — talented and committed — still learning how her voice projects differently against hard floors and bare walls, leaving at the end of each day with a tension headache she can’t quite account for. She deserves so much more support than she is likely getting.
There may have been a teacher who goes home to small children of her own. Who arrives each morning already touched out, and spends the day warmly, patiently fielding requests for physical proximity from the children who need her most.
There may have been a veteran teacher carrying fifteen years of accumulated system failures, under-resourced classrooms, and families in crisis — still showing up, still caring with her whole heart, but running thinner than anyone has thought to notice or thank her for.
Our OT reports land in their inboxes. We add to the list of things they need to do, adjust, monitor, and document. Rarely do we pause to ask what they need to be the regulated adult the child is so lucky to have at the front of the room.
What this means for our practice
None of this is an argument for lowering expectations of teachers, or for excusing the gaps in support that neurodivergent children too often face.
It is an argument for widening our lens, and softening our hearts toward the people already inside the system we’re trying to help.
When we think about sensory environments, we tend to think about the child’s sensory experience of the room. We rarely think about the teachers. When we think about regulation, we think about the child’s nervous system. We rarely think about whose nervous system the child is borrowing from, or what it costs that person to keep offering it, day after day, mostly unseen by people like us.
Teacher burnout is not just a workforce sustainability issue — though it is that. It is a clinical issue. The wellbeing of the adults in classrooms is inseparable from the wellbeing of the children in them, and deserves to be treated with the same seriousness and tenderness we give the children themselves.
And because we, as external agents of change, sit at the edges of this ecosystem rather than inside it, perhaps the most useful thing we can do is hold that position lightly and gratefully — offering support that respects how little we see, rather than recommendations that assume we see everything.
For us to genuinely care about the sensory and regulatory needs of the children we work with, we need to extend that same care — warmly, and without conditions — to the educators who spend six hours a day with them, with so much love and so little fanfare.
That’s the thinking — and the gratitude — behind what we’re building next.
A sensory safe classroom: Tips for an exhausted workforce
Coming soon, with love and rage. Get in touch to be notified when this resource launches.
References
- Jennings, P. A., & Greenberg, M. T. (2009). The prosocial classroom: Teacher social and emotional competence in relation to student and classroom outcomes. Review of Educational Research, 79(1), 491–525. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308325693
- Klusmann, U., Richter, D., & Lüdtke, O. (2016). Teachers’ emotional exhaustion is negatively related to students’ achievement: Evidence from a large-scale assessment study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(8), 1193–1203. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000125
- Madigan, D. J., & Kim, L. E. (2021). Does teacher burnout affect students? A systematic review of its association with academic achievement and student-reported outcomes. International Journal of Educational Research, 105, 101714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101714
- Feldman, R. (2007). Parent–infant synchrony and the construction of shared timing; physiological precursors, developmental outcomes, and risk conditions. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 48(3–4), 329–354.
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. Norton. [Note: specific claims within polyvagal theory remain subject to ongoing scientific debate; the broader evidence base for co-regulation as a relational process is well-established independently.]
- Sutton, R. E., & Wheatley, K. F. (2003). Teachers’ emotions and teaching: A review of the literature and directions for future research. Educational Psychology Review, 15(4), 327–358.
- Noell, G. H., Witt, J. C., Slider, N. J., Connell, J. E., Gatti, S. L., Williams, K. L., Koenig, J. L., Resetar, J. L., & Duhon, G. J. (2005). Treatment implementation following behavioral consultation in schools: A comparison of three follow-up strategies. School Psychology Review, 34(1), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/02796015.2005.12086277