WiseLearn began long before it had a name
When I think about where WiseLearn began, there isn't one particular moment I can point to.
It certainly didn't begin with a business plan, a website or a decision to create a program. In many ways, it has been taking shape across most of my life: through the teachers who influenced me, almost three decades working in education, my studies in psychology and education, becoming a parent, my own experiences of stress and loss, and a continuing curiosity about what helps us navigate life as human beings.
Looking back, I can see threads that seemed quite separate at the time. Over the years, they kept crossing until eventually they became difficult to separate at all.
It started with a teacher
One of my earliest influences was my teacher in my final year of primary school.
I was a very shy child, but I loved being in her classroom. She brought humour and creativity into learning and created the kind of experience that stays with you long after you have forgotten the details of individual lessons.
I had known for a long time that I wanted to become a teacher, particularly in early childhood. I wanted to create some of that same feeling for other children: a place where learning could be interesting, creative, engaging and enjoyable.
The path there, however, wasn't quite as straightforward as I had imagined.
A detour that became part of the story
When I finished school, teaching jobs were scarce and the advice at the time was not particularly encouraging. I remember being devastated. I knew what I wanted to do, but suddenly it didn't seem like the sensible path to take.
Instead, I took a detour and studied Psychology and Communications.
At the time, it felt as though I was moving away from what I really wanted. Looking back, that detour turned out to be surprisingly useful.
Psychology gave me another way of thinking about people: how we develop, think, feel, communicate and respond to the world around us. I couldn't have known then how often I would return to those questions throughout my career, or how central they would eventually become to my work.
Teaching continued to pull at me, though, and eventually I followed the path I had wanted in the first place. I completed my teacher training and began teaching in 1997.
My first class gave me quite an introduction.
Creativity needed something alongside it
I had a particularly challenging class for a beginning teacher. I arrived with plenty of ideas and a strong desire to bring humour, creativity and enjoyment into the classroom, influenced in part by the teacher I had remembered all those years earlier.
I learned very quickly that this was only part of what children needed.
They also needed structure. They needed clear expectations and predictable routines. They needed to know how things worked, what was happening next and what was expected of them. Sometimes things I assumed children would simply know had to be explicitly taught and modelled.
That first year began to change the way I thought about classrooms.
Structure did not have to mean rigidity, just as creativity did not mean the absence of boundaries. A classroom could be playful and purposeful, warm and well organised, flexible and predictable. In fact, I began to see that these things often supported one another.
Over the years, my understanding became much more nuanced, but that early lesson stayed with me: what happens around a person can influence what becomes possible for them.
I kept noticing
Across almost three decades in education, as a teacher and later a leader, I kept noticing versions of the same thing.
The environment mattered. Relationships mattered. Movement mattered. Transitions and predictability mattered. The amount of information being presented mattered. The way an adult responded in a difficult moment mattered. Creativity, humour and play mattered.
Sometimes relatively small changes produced surprisingly significant differences.
I became increasingly interested not only in what worked, but in why.
Why could a child manage something easily on one day and struggle with exactly the same thing on another? Why did changing the environment sometimes change behaviour? Why could movement improve what happened afterwards? Why did feeling known and connected to another person matter so much? Why could something that appeared straightforward from the outside feel overwhelmingly difficult to the person experiencing it?
What we could see on the surface was clearly only part of the picture.
Becoming a parent added another perspective. So did my own experiences of stress. Questions that had occupied me professionally began to intersect increasingly with everyday life.
When my younger daughter was born, I found myself drawn back towards psychology, particularly neuroscience. I began reading widely again, and Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson's The Whole-Brain Child was one of the books that opened another door for me.
What fascinated me wasn't simply learning facts about the brain. I was recognising connections between what I was reading and things I had observed in classrooms, in parenting and in myself for years.
I wanted to understand more.
When understanding became deeply personal
I had already begun thinking about further study and training when life took a turn I could never have anticipated.
In 2022, my father and my husband died within nine months of each other.
There is a much bigger story contained within that sentence, and perhaps one day I will write about my experiences of grief and loss more fully. It is part of the WiseLearn story, but it is also a story in its own right and deserves more space than I can give it here.
What matters in this story is that much of what I had spent years thinking about — stress, wellbeing, coping, connection and the things that support us — suddenly became intensely personal.
Having knowledge about wellbeing did not make grief easy. Drawing on what I knew could itself be difficult when the load I was carrying was enormous.
That experience kept me reflecting on something that has become increasingly important in my work: knowing what may help us and being able to access it when we are under significant load are not necessarily the same thing.
The learning I had been considering before those losses still mattered to me. If anything, I wanted to understand more.
In the following year, I trained with Relax Kids and completed the Teaching Certificate in the Science of Social and Emotional Learning through Northwestern University. My learning continued from there, eventually taking me further into neuroscience and neuroplasticity.
The more I learned, the more connections I could see between research, education and the experiences of ordinary life.
The questions became bigger than education
Along the way, I kept returning to a broader question.
How do we support ourselves and one another as human beings when life is often hard?
That might be in a classroom, but it might just as easily be at home, at work, within a family or during a difficult season of life.
How do we support a child who is overwhelmed without seeing only the behaviour in front of us? How do we recognise when our own load is becoming too great? How do we create environments and relationships that make things a little easier rather than inadvertently adding more? How do we know when to persist, when to change something, when to remove something and when what we really need is a pause?
I became particularly interested in the small things.
Not because small things can solve everything. They can't. There are circumstances that require substantial change, specialist support, time or simply the recognition that something is genuinely hard.
Small things matter because they are often available to us in everyday life.
A pause before responding. A little movement. Less noise. A clearer starting point. A predictable rhythm. A moment of connection. Removing one unnecessary demand. Making a task smaller. Protecting something that already helps. Making space for creativity or enjoyment.
One action may seem insignificant on its own. Repeated over time, however, small shifts can compound. They can change patterns and experiences and sometimes create the conditions for something different to become possible.
The why, the what and the how
This is where the different threads of my life and work eventually began to come together as WiseLearn.
I didn't want to create another collection of strategies telling people what they should do. Strategies can be useful, but without understanding they can quickly become another checklist to follow.
I wanted to help people understand more.
There is the why: developing accessible understanding of what might be happening beneath what we can immediately see, including what we know about the brain, body, stress, learning and human responses.
There is the what: becoming curious about the conditions and needs that may be influencing what is happening. Relationships, environment, movement, predictability, cognitive and emotional load, connection and everyday needs can all be part of that picture.
Then there is the how: having a way to pause long enough to notice, reflect and make a more thoughtful choice about what might help next.
There isn't one perfect response because people are different, circumstances are different and what we need can change from one day — or even one moment — to another.
Sometimes the choice that follows our reflection will be significant. Sometimes it will be surprisingly small.
Both can matter.
So, this is WiseLearn
WiseLearn is relatively new as a name, but the thinking behind it has been developing for a very long time.
It has grown through classrooms and leadership, psychology and education, parenting and professional learning. It has been shaped by curiosity, mistakes, successes, stress, grief, ordinary family life and countless moments when something made me stop and wonder why it had made such a difference.
At its heart is a belief that understanding gives us more thoughtful choices about what comes next.
We can learn to look beneath what we see. We can become curious rather than immediately reaching for a solution. We can notice what is adding load and what is helping. We can pause long enough to consider what we might keep, modify, subtract or add.
Then we can try something and notice what happens.
That is also why one of the first resources I have created through WiseLearn is 20 Small Shifts for Calmer Days. It isn't a prescription for how to live, parent or teach. It is simply a collection of small things to explore, alongside an invitation to notice what makes a difference for you, your child or someone you support.
Because sometimes understanding leads us towards a major change.
Sometimes it leads us towards one small shift.
And over time, those small shifts can matter enormously.
That is the space I hope to explore here in The WiseLearn Journal.
Want to explore some of these ideas in everyday life?20 Small Shifts for Calmer Days is a free WiseLearn guide with simple ideas to notice, explore and try — for you, your child, or someone you support. See the dowload link on the page below:
About Nicole Nolan
Nicole is an educator, consultant and founder of WiseLearn Education, with almost 30 years' experience across early childhood, primary and secondary education. Her work brings together education, psychology, social and emotional learning, neuroscience and neuroplasticity to explore practical ways we can support learning, wellbeing and everyday life.
Comments