Head Start Teachers' Professional Development, Well-being, Attitudes, and Practices: Understanding Changes Over Time and Predictive Associations.

Head Start Teachers' Professional Development, Well-being, Attitudes, and Practices: Understanding Changes Over Time and Predictive Associations. Am J Community Psychol. 2019 May 22;: Authors: Harding JF, Connors MC, Krauss AF, Aikens N, Malone L, Tarullo L Abstract Early care and education (ECE) teachers shape children's daily experiences in many ways. Specifically, teachers' well-being, attitudes about child development, and teaching practices are central influences on children's learning. One crucial way ECE programs support teachers to enhance children's learning environments is through the provision of professional development (PD), but little research has examined the PD provided by ECE programs in the absence of focused initiatives to support teachers. In this descriptive study, we use data from a nationally representative study of Head Start teachers (N = 484) to explore whether teachers' job satisfaction, depression, developmentally appropriate attitudes, and frequency of engagement in math and literacy activities are associated with the number of (a) overall PD supports available to teachers, (b) curriculum supports received by teachers, and (c) mentoring supports received by teachers. Many of the associations between teachers' outcomes and overall PD supports, curriculum supports, and mentoring supports were not statistically significant, perhaps because the PD variables do not measure the quality or content of the PD pr...
Source: American Journal of Community Psychology - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Am J Community Psychol Source Type: research