Your first year of teaching does not have to be perfect, but your classroom needs clear expectations.

I’m sharing the first-year teacher advice I wish I had known before stepping into my own classroom, beginning with the lesson I believe matters most:

Teach the expectations before expecting the behavior.

We often tell students to “be respectful,” “work independently,” “walk quietly,” or “clean up," but what do those expectations actually look and sound like to a child?

In this episode, we talk about why classroom expectations and routines should be explicitly taught, modeled, practiced, reinforced, and retaught throughout the school year. Classroom management isn’t something you establish during the first week and never revisit. It’s an ongoing part of instruction.

I also break down practical first-year teacher tips for creating a classroom that feels structured without becoming rigid, including how to:

✨ Explicitly teach classroom expectations and procedures
✨ Model what routines should look, sound, and feel like
✨ Practice transitions before you actually need them
✨ Choose your classroom non-negotiables
✨ Correct behavior calmly without turning everything into a power struggle
✨ Use specific praise instead of generic “good job” feedback
✨ Maintain boundaries without becoming the “mean teacher”
✨ Build student independence through predictable systems
✨ Stop taking every difficult behavior personally
✨ Reteach expectations after breaks or when routines start slipping
✨ Avoid creating classroom-management systems you cannot realistically maintain
✨ Protect your own energy during your first year

We also explore classroom management through my CICERO Method: Regulation, Confidence, Intelligence, Connection, Emotional Resilience, and Optimization.

Predictable routines can support student regulation. Clear expectations can build confidence. Consistent boundaries can strengthen relational trust. Opportunities to repair mistakes can build emotional resilience. And well-designed classroom systems can help both teachers and students function more independently.

Most importantly, I want new teachers to remember this:

Teaching expectations is teaching.

Taking time during the beginning of the school year to practice lining up, transitioning, asking for help, using materials, participating in discussions, working independently, and solving everyday classroom problems is not wasted instructional time.

It's an investment in every lesson that comes afterward.

And when your classroom inevitably has a chaotic day?

Reset.

Reteach.

Practice again.

That doesn’t mean your classroom-management plan failed.

It means you're teaching children.

Your first year isn't supposed to prove that you already know everything about teaching. It's your opportunity to begin discovering what kind of teacher you want to become.

🎧 Listen to “First-Year Teacher Tips: Classroom Expectations, Routines & What I Wish I Knew Before Teaching” on In The Pink.

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Why do we remember certain teachers decades after leaving their classrooms, even when we can’t remember the lessons they taught us?

In this episode of In The Pink, I explore The Miss Honey Effect: the psychology and neuroscience behind why emotionally safe, supportive, and challenging teachers can have such a lasting impact on students.

Using Miss Honey from Matilda as a starting point, we dive into the science of emotion and memory, psychological safety, stress and executive functioning, teacher-student relationships, academic identity, belonging, productive struggle, co-regulation, and teacher expectations.

Because being a “Miss Honey” teacher isn’t simply about being nice.

It’s about creating a classroom where students know:

✨ I can make a mistake without being humiliated.
✨ I can struggle without believing I’m incapable.
✨ I can be corrected without believing I’m unwanted.
✨ I can do difficult things.
✨ I belong in spaces where hard thinking happens.

I also explore how these ideas connect to my CICERO Method: Regulation, Confidence, Intelligence, Connection, Emotional Resilience, and Optimization—a framework for thinking about the psychological and developmental conditions that help students access learning and build greater independence.

We talk about why regulation matters for cognition, how teacher expectations can subtly shape classroom interactions, why shame may produce compliance without actually teaching self-regulation, and why constantly rescuing students from difficulty can unintentionally undermine the confidence we're trying to build.

Most importantly, we explore a question every educator should consider:

What are students learning about themselves while they are learning from us?

Because students may forget the worksheet.

They may forget the learning objective.

They may even forget much of what we taught them.

But they may remember the teacher who waited for them to find the answer.

The teacher who made being wrong feel safe.

The teacher who challenged them because they believed they were capable.

The teacher who greeted them after their worst day as though they still belonged.

Eventually, our students won't need us standing beside them saying, “Try again.”

They may begin saying it to themselves.

🎧 Listen to “The Miss Honey Effect: Why Students Remember How Teachers Made Them Feel” on In The Pink.

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In this episode of In The Pink, we're unpacking some of the most misunderstood psychology and mental health terms on social media. From gaslighting and narcissism to ADHD, dopamine, trauma bonding, OCD, boundaries, and emotional intelligence, we'll explore what these terms actually mean according to psychological research and why using them accurately matters.

Mental health awareness has made incredible progress thanks to social media—but viral content can also oversimplify complex psychological concepts. Join me as we separate evidence-based psychology from internet buzzwords and discuss how misinformation can shape the way we understand ourselves, our relationships, and mental health.

Whether you're interested in psychology, neuroscience, ADHD, education, therapy, mental health, or simply want to become a more informed consumer of online content, this episode will help you think critically about the language we use every day.

• What Narcissistic Personality Disorder is—and what it isn't
• The real definition of gaslighting
• Why trauma bonding is more than going through something difficult together
• The difference between being triggered and feeling uncomfortable
• What dopamine actually does in the brain
• Why saying "I'm so OCD" can be misleading
• Common misconceptions about ADHD and executive functioning
• What hyperfixation really means
• The difference between healthy boundaries and controlling behavior
• What emotional intelligence actually involves

If you're tired of psychology being reduced to 30-second TikToks, this episode is for you.

🎧 Follow In The Pink for weekly science-backed conversations on psychology, ADHD, neuroscience, education, emotional well-being, and personal growth.

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