In a recent episode of The Table, I sat down with Lisa Riegel, author of Neurowell and Aspirations to Operations, to discuss something that’s been missing from too many conversations about school culture: the actual science of how our brains work. After spending 15 years consulting with schools and teaching across secondary, post-secondary, and graduate levels, Lisa has become what she calls “the guru for helping schools come up with solutions for kids who are rough, who are not your typical student.”
What struck me most about our conversation wasn’t just the neuroscience itself, but how understanding the brain can completely reframe those discipline policies we’ve been using for years that just aren’t working. Lisa’s work focuses on creating what she calls “neurowell cultures” in schools, and it’s the kind of practical, research-backed approach that actually explains why some of our most well-intentioned practices fall flat.
What Is a Neurowell Culture?
Lisa breaks down the neurowell framework into three essential components: safe, supportive, and proactive environments. But here’s where it gets interesting. When we talk about safety in schools, we immediately think about physical safety protocols, locked doors, and emergency drills. Lisa argues we’re missing the bigger picture.
“It’s really about emotional safety and intellectual safety,” she explained. Think about a student who walks into class every single day already behind, already lost. That student isn’t intellectually safe. We’ve been talking about differentiation for 20 years, but when Lisa walks into classrooms, she still sees mostly teacher-led instruction to an entire group of students, regardless of where individual kids are academically.
The supportive piece means moving away from the traditional “I’m the boss, you’re my subordinate” dynamic. It’s about power-sharing and helping students understand they’re part of a learning community where the goal isn’t individual compliance, but collective learning.
And the proactive component? Lisa uses a simple example that made me laugh: “I always ask elementary teachers, can we predict that kids are gonna roll around on the carpet and poke themselves? And teachers are always like, yeah. And I’m like, well then why are you angry when they do it?”
If we know what’s going to happen, we need to design our environments and responses accordingly rather than reacting with frustration when completely predictable things occur.
The Neuroscience Behind Student Behavior
One of the most practical insights Lisa shared involves understanding how stress actually works in the brain. When a student experiences stress, their amygdala (the emotional processing center) activates and essentially hijacks their prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for rational thinking, decision-making, and self-regulation.
“If I’m stressed out and my amygdala is active, I cannot access my prefrontal cortex to problem solve,” Lisa explained. This means that in the moment a student is dysregulated, asking them to “make better choices” or “think about what you did” is neurologically impossible. Their brain literally cannot do what we’re asking.
This is why traditional discipline approaches that rely on consequences in the moment often backfire. We’re trying to engage a part of the brain that’s offline. The real work has to happen before the incident (creating environments that prevent dysregulation) and after the student has returned to a calm state (processing what happened and building new neural pathways).
Lisa also introduced me to a concept I hadn’t considered: our bodies have four states when awake—calm, alert, alarm, and fear. The alert state is that productive feeling you get before a job interview or a big game. You’re energized but not paralyzed. The problem Lisa sees in classrooms today is that many students don’t know how to go from calm to alert. They jump straight to alarm and shut down.
Why? Because they haven’t practiced it. They haven’t been given opportunities to experiment, struggle, and work through challenges in a safe environment where failure is part of the learning process.
Rethinking How We Respond to Student Behavior
Lisa’s work with schools often involves helping administrators understand why their current behavior management systems aren’t working. She shared an insight that reframes everything: “Behavior is a form of communication.”
When a student acts out, they’re communicating something—whether it’s “I don’t feel safe,” “I don’t understand this,” “I’m hungry,” “I didn’t sleep,” or “Something happened at home.” Our job isn’t to punish the communication; it’s to understand what’s being communicated and address the underlying need.
This doesn’t mean there are no boundaries or consequences. It means those consequences need to align with how brains actually work and what will create lasting change. Punitive measures might stop a behavior temporarily through fear, but they don’t build the neural pathways necessary for students to develop self-regulation, empathy, or problem-solving skills.
Lisa emphasized that this approach isn’t about being “soft” on students. It’s about being effective. “If we understand the brain, all of a sudden some of these weird policies that we do around discipline or behavior management, we look at them through that lens and we go, this is why it’s not working.”
The Power of Letting Students Fail
Toward the end of our conversation, Lisa shared something that challenges a lot of current educational practice: the power of letting kids fail. She worked with a middle school science teacher who was about to teach a unit on electrical circuits. Instead of starting with a vocabulary pre-test or front-loading all the information, Lisa suggested a different approach.
“Put some light bulbs on a table and some wires and some circuits and make it a challenge. Say, you got five minutes. See if you can figure out how to turn this thing on and let the kids experiment and fail and celebrate that.”
After five minutes of experimentation, the teacher could facilitate a discussion: “What did your group try? You hooked this wire to this wire? I’m so glad you did that because that’s a common misconception. Let’s talk about why.” This approach creates a T-chart of what works and what doesn’t, and students learn through the faulty thinking rather than just memorizing the “right way.”
The brilliance of this approach is twofold. First, it teaches students how to persist through struggle by actually giving them practice doing it. Second, it helps them understand the why behind concepts rather than just the process. As Lisa put it, “We teach so much in a way that there’s a right way. Kids learn the process, but they don’t understand why the process works.”
This experimental, inquiry-based approach also addresses a complaint Lisa hears constantly from teachers: “These kids can’t persist through a struggle. The minute they don’t know it, they shut down.” Her response? “Because they don’t know how. They haven’t had that experience.”
If our classrooms are set up as information delivery systems where students either fail or succeed at giving back what we taught them, we haven’t created contexts where struggle is celebrated as part of learning. We haven’t exercised that muscle.
Applying Neurowell Principles to Staff Culture
While our conversation focused primarily on students, Lisa’s framework applies equally to how we lead and support teachers. Education is a fundamentally human industry, yet we often fail to take care of the humans in the system. Teacher recruitment and retention challenges aren’t separate from student experience; they’re connected.
When teachers work in environments where they feel emotionally and intellectually unsafe, where they’re treated as subordinates rather than collaborative professionals, and where they’re expected to react to problems rather than proactively address them, we see the same stress responses Lisa describes in students. The amygdala takes over, the prefrontal cortex goes offline, and teachers become less effective, less creative, and more likely to leave the profession.
Creating a neurowell culture means applying the same brain-based principles to adult learning and leadership. It means recognizing that when a teacher is struggling, punishment or harsh evaluation won’t build the neural pathways necessary for growth. It means creating emotionally safe spaces for teachers to experiment, fail, reflect, and improve.
Moving from Aspiration to Operation
Lisa’s newest book, Aspirations to Operations, addresses a gap she’s observed repeatedly in schools: the distance between what we want to create and actually making it happen. Schools have mission statements about inclusive communities and student-centered learning, but translating those aspirations into daily operations requires specific tools and frameworks.
The book is designed as a practical guidebook that helps leaders move from theory to implementation. “My hope is that as people read it, they will gain some self-reflection in it, and then they’ll also have all the tools they need to operationalize it,” Lisa explained.
This is the work that matters. Understanding neuroscience is valuable, but only if we use that understanding to redesign our policies, practices, and daily interactions with students and staff. It requires looking at everything from how we structure our school day to how we respond when a third-grader melts down to how we evaluate teacher performance.
What This Means for Your School
As I reflected on this conversation with Lisa, I kept coming back to a central question: How many of our current practices are based on how we wish brains worked rather than how they actually work?
We wish students could access rational thinking when they’re emotionally dysregulated. We wish punitive consequences would build character and self-control. We wish telling students information once would be enough for them to master it. But wishing doesn’t make it so.
The schools that will thrive in the coming years are those willing to align their practices with the science of learning and development. This doesn’t mean throwing out everything we’re doing. It means being honest about what’s working and what’s not, understanding why, and making evidence-based adjustments.
Creating a neurowell culture starts with education. School leaders, teachers, and staff need to understand basic neuroscience—not at a doctoral level, but enough to recognize when their practices align with how brains learn and when they don’t. From there, it’s about making intentional, incremental changes to create environments where both students and adults can be safe, supported, and set up for success.
Lisa’s work reminds us that we don’t need completely new programs or massive budget increases to make meaningful change. We need to apply what science has already taught us about how people learn, grow, and thrive. The question isn’t whether we can afford to create neurowell cultures in our schools. It’s whether we can afford not to.
Lisa Riegel’s books, Neurowell and Aspirations to Operations, are available on Amazon. For more insights on building communities where everyone belongs, subscribe to The Table podcast and follow Dean’s Roundtable on Instagram and TikTok.
