Teachers in the US have historically served affective roles of uplift and civic engagement (Fultz, 1995; Gere, 2005), but reforms in the last century privileged technical aspects of the profession (Buchanan, 2015). The COVID-19 crisis, which shifted learning online and isolated students, revealed the limitations of a technical focus in teacher education, and compelled me to reclaim the affective domain via strategies grounded in uplift and "cariño" (Ramirez, et al., 2016). These strategies included: (1) mindfulness and emotional awareness activities; (2) curriculum emphasizing social-emotional learning; and (3) asynchronous supports highlighting self-care, antiracism, and trauma-informed pedagogy. My adaptations modeled the ways teacher candidates might expand their notions of "teacher identity" (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009) as they imagine future work with students.