What Challenging Students Taught Me About Teaching and the Conditions for Learning
Lessons from the classroom that shaped how I understand learning, behavior, and human potential
Welcome. I’m Debbie Leonard, an educator focused on improving the working conditions and learning experiences of teachers and students, especially those who struggle most.
After three decades in urban classrooms, I’ve learned that emotions are everything. They drive the brain systems behind learning, behavior, memory, and attention. Anything else is noise. When classrooms generate positive emotional energy through relationships, joy, and belonging, learning follows.
My beginnings in education shaped not only my career, but my life. They revealed how emotions shape our relationships, from family and friendships to colleagues and students, and drive how people learn.
I began my career in a boys reformatory where the days were long and time off was nonexistent. There was no union, no holidays, and no free minutes to yourself. We worked eight to five, five days a week, with Christmas Day as the only exception. Our days were filled with instruction, constant team collaboration, meetings with parents and psychologists, daily group counseling sessions alongside our students, and mandatory dorm-team meetings each week. Instruction mattered, but it was only one piece of the treatment puzzle. This whole-child approach, long before it was a buzzword, shaped how I came to understand teaching, learning, and behavior. I learned that knowing a student’s history made me more empathetic, understanding what they loved deepened our connection, and honoring what they feared earned their trust.
From there, I moved into an urban middle school serving students diagnosed with severe behavior challenges. All of my students were labeled as conduct disordered and considered too violent and disruptive for traditional classrooms. This is where I learned, firsthand, that learning cannot occur until the conditions for safety, trust, and emotional regulation are in place. To teach content, I first had to manage the intense emotions dominating the room. That work pushed me to seek a deeper understanding of my students and the brain conditions required for them to learn and thrive.
With the support of colleagues inside and outside education, I studied how emotions shape brain activity and, in turn, drive behavior, attention, memory, and readiness to learn. I worked to intentionally create environments where the brain could shift out of survival and into states that supported learning. This was not theoretical. It was daily, necessary, and urgent.
Although unorthodox, especially in the nineteen eighties, a small team of colleagues and I identified two critical components for learning, that you will not learn in college. First, we used the breath to help students connect mind and body and return to a calmer, more regulated state. Second, we built in short, structured movement experiences that allowed students to release energy, connect with peers, and learn actively. While enjoyable, these practices were not rewards. They were foundational conditions for learning.
Carrying these pillars forward, I later developed a program for students who were failing primarily due to behavior and attendance. To reduce variables and better understand what was driving behavior and engagement, the program separated students by gender. The first group of twenty entered with a combined GPA of zero point five and more than one hundred eighty days of suspension from sixth grade alone. Over time, the structure of the program evolved, but the constants remained the same. Breath. Movement. Collaboration. When those conditions were present, engagement and learning followed.
Across decades of teaching, coaching, and system-level work, one truth has remained constant. Without understanding how emotions shape the brain and without tools to work within that reality of our classrooms, nothing else matters. Not programs. Not technology. Not artificial intelligence. Not curriculum mandates. Not professional development. When emotional conditions are right, learning follows. When they are not, everything else is noise.
BrainZones was developed inside those severe behavior classrooms to meet a very real need. Students and teachers needed a shared language to understand emotional states, anticipate behavior shifts, and determine what course of action would best serve both the student and the classroom. That shared language also gave us a lens to recognize when learning conditions were beginning to erode and when a shift in the experience was needed to sustain attention, reduce disruption, and support a healthy classroom culture.
Over time, BrainZones has evolved into a practical framework that translates the neuroscience behind learning, behavior, attention, and memory into language educators and students can actually use in real classrooms. It was never about naming emotions for their own sake. It was about understanding conditions, guiding reactions, and creating environments where learning and life success could take hold.