When Stress Walks into the Classroom - Understanding the Emotional Relationship Between Teachers and Teenagers

Classrooms are often viewed as places of learning, behaviour management, curriculum delivery, and assessment. Yet beneath the surface of every classroom lies something far more complex - a constantly shifting emotional and physiological environment shaped by relationships, stress, safety, connection, and emotional regulation.

For many teachers working with adolescents today, classrooms can feel emotionally exhausting. Students may appear disengaged, reactive, anxious, oppositional, withdrawn, or overwhelmed. At the same time, teachers themselves are increasingly managing growing emotional, cognitive, and professional demands while attempting to remain calm, supportive, and effective within increasingly complex learning environments.

Importantly, these emotional experiences do not occur separately. Emerging neuroscience, compassion-focused research, and educational research suggest that emotional regulation and dysregulation are frequently bi-directional processes occurring between teachers and students in real time. In other words, stress does not simply sit “within” the teacher or “within” the student. Stress moves through relationships and learning environments.

During my doctoral research exploring teacher and student wellbeing, teachers increasingly identified greater awareness of the “bi-directional effect of teacher and student emotion regulation and dysregulation” following neuroscience-informed and compassion-focused professional learning. Teachers described becoming more aware not only of student emotional responses, but also of the impact of their own stress reactions on classroom interactions and relationships.

This understanding is particularly important during adolescence.

Adolescence represents a period of enormous neurological, emotional, and social development. Teenagers are not simply “older children” with adult reasoning capacities. Their brains are still developing, particularly areas associated with emotional regulation, impulse control, decision-making, perspective taking, and executive functioning. At the same time, adolescents become increasingly sensitive to peer relationships, belonging, social evaluation, rejection, and emotional ambiguity.

As educators know, even seemingly minor social interactions during adolescence can trigger significant emotional responses. When stress levels increase, the developing brain prioritises safety and survival over logical thinking and reflective decision-making. Compassion-focused theory explains that during perceived threat, the brain automatically activates threat-based motivational systems associated with fight, flight, freeze, or shutdown responses.

Increasingly, educators are recognising the importance of understanding adolescent behaviour through developmental and relational lenses rather than automatically pathologising young people. As I discussed in earlier work, the goal is not simply behaviour management, but helping adults more confidently identify “what children need” emotionally, relationally, and developmentally.

Compassion-focused researcher Professor Paul Gilbert describes compassion as “a sensitivity to suffering in self and others with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it.” Importantly, compassion within educational settings is not about lowering expectations or becoming permissive. Rather, compassion-focused approaches help educators understand the motivational systems underpinning behaviour, emotional responses, shame, self-criticism, and threat activation.

Professor James Kirby and colleagues have further highlighted the importance of compassion within classrooms, explaining that compassionate approaches support both individual and group wellbeing. Recent compassion-focused research also emphasises the importance of self-compassion, not simply compassion towards others. Teachers who understand their own emotional responses and actively engage in self-regulation are better positioned to support students through co-regulation and relational safety.

Educational researcher Professor Robyn Gillies has similarly highlighted the importance of relational classroom environments and collaborative learning experiences in supporting student engagement, emotional safety, communication, and learning. Increasingly, educational research suggests that students learn most effectively within environments where they feel psychologically safe, connected, and supported.This is where understanding the nervous system becomes critically important for educators.

From a neuroscience perspective, humans are constantly and unconsciously monitoring for cues of safety, danger, connection, rejection, and belonging within their environment. The autonomic nervous system, including the vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system, plays a central role in emotional regulation and physiological calm. When individuals feel emotionally safe, connected, and supported, parasympathetic regulation increases, supporting emotional regulation, relational connection, learning, attention, and reflective thinking.

When threat is perceived, sympathetic nervous system activation increases and survival responses dominate.

Importantly, this applies not only to students, but to teachers as well.

Research increasingly highlights the concept of “stress contagion” within classrooms, wherein students can become emotionally affected by teacher stress and teachers can similarly become impacted by student dysregulation. Research by Oberle and Schonert-Reichl demonstrated that teacher burnout and stress can influence the emotional climate of classrooms and may even affect students’ physiological stress regulation. This helps explain why some classrooms can feel emotionally calm and connected, while others feel tense, reactive, or emotionally draining.

One of the most significant findings emerging from my research and professional practice has been the importance of shifting from asking:

“What is wrong with this student?”

to:

“What might be happening for this student - and what might also be happening for me?”

This subtle shift changes everything.

When teachers understand the relationship between stress, emotional regulation, neurodevelopment, and behaviour, they become more able to respond rather than react. Instead of viewing behaviour purely through a disciplinary lens, teachers can begin recognising that dysregulated behaviour often reflects underlying stress, emotional overload, disconnection, fear, shame, confusion, exhaustion, or unmet emotional needs.

Teacher wellbeing cannot continue to be viewed as separate from student wellbeing. The emotional state of teachers influences classroom climate, relationships, learning engagement, and emotional safety. As one teacher participant in my research explained, “focusing on teachers first is the key point of the training.”

Informed and self-regulated teachers are more able to focus on student needs to create healthy relationships built on trust and understanding. Yet without adequate support and understanding, teachers themselves can begin to feel overwhelmed and alone while managing not only curriculum demands, but also the growing emotional complexity of classrooms.

Professional learning that supports teachers both professionally and personally may therefore become increasingly important within modern educational environments. Teachers need opportunities to better understand not only how students work and learn, but also how stress, relationships, emotional regulation, compassion, and classroom relationships influence their own wellbeing and interactions within the classroom.

Learning is not solely cognitive. It is emotional, relational, physiological, and social.

When stress walks into the classroom, it affects everyone.

But so can safety.

So can compassion.

And so can understanding.

Selected References
Gilbert, P. (2014). The origins and nature of compassion focused therapy. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 53(1), 6–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjc.12043
Gilbert, P., & Simos, G. (2022). Compassion focused therapy: Clinical practice and applications. Routledge.
Kirby, J. N. (2025). Compassion as a transdiagnostic target to reduce mental health symptoms and promote well-being. Nature Reviews Psychology, 4(4), 249–263. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-025-00422-4
Kirby, J. N., Sherwell, C., Lynn, S., & Moloney-Gibb, D. (2023). Compassion as a framework for creating individual and group-level wellbeing in the classroom: New directions. Journal of Psychologists and Counsellors in Schools, 33(1), 2–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/jgc.2023.5
Moloney-Gibb, D., Sherwell, C., Lynn, S., & Kirby, J. N. (2026). The three circle model of compassion focused therapy: An experimental paradigm to assess dynamic psychophysiological changes of emotion regulation systems. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 201, Article 105028. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2026.105028
Oberg, G., Macmahon, S., & Carroll, A. (2025). Assessing the interplay: teacher efficacy, compassion fatigue, and educator well-being in Australia. The Australian Educational Researcher, 52, 1105–1131. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-024-00755-8
Oberle, E., & Schonert-Reichl, K. A. (2016). Stress contagion in the classroom? The link between classroom teacher burnout and morning cortisol in elementary school students. Social Science & Medicine, 159, 30–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.04.031
Princi-Hubbard, R. (2019). Children: The most misunderstood beings on the planet. The Science of Psychotherapy.
Princi-Hubbard, R. (2025). Teaching the new teacher with compassionate pedagogy. In Compassionate Pedagogy in Higher Education. Libri Publishing.
Smala, S., McLay, K., & Gillies, R. M. (2025). Teacher relationships and social connectedness. Teachers and Teaching. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2025.2494036