Supporting Head Start Teachers' Instructional Practices in a High-Stakes Context Through a Multiyear Research-Practice Partnership

• In Event: Exploring Research Practice Partnerships in Early Childhood Settings: Opportunities, Strategies, and Key Findings

Abstract

This paper explores the second year of a professional development (PD) program co-designed with a local school district to improve Head Start teachers’ Instructional Support (IS) practices, as measured by the Pre-K CLASS (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008), a high stakes accountability measure for Head Start programs (Buell, Han & Vukelich, 2016; Mashburn, 2017). Through joint meetings with the district’s Head Start supervisors and Director of Early Childhood Education, we designed a small-scale PD program based on recent research (Casbergue, Bedford, & Burstein, 2014; Moreno, Green & Koehn, 2015; Zan & Donegan-Ritter, 2013) to support improvement of teachers’ practices. Year 1 of the study piloted the PD with 7 teachers, with findings indicating that participating teachers significantly improved their IS scores. In Year 2 we worked with the participating Head Start supervisors to refine/revise the PD to fit into their existing supervisory practices (Penuel & Gallagher, 2017). Four supervisors were selected to implement the PD with their teachers (N=9). The remaining supervisors (5) and their assigned teachers (14) continued with a business as usual approach. Research questions focused on the impact of the PD on teachers’ IS scores and the experiences of the supervisors implementing the PD.
Supervisors observed teachers 1x/month from November 2016-May 2017, taking fieldnotes of teacher/child interactions. Teacher/supervisor pairs jointly read through and “rewrote” these observations using the constructs of mid- and high-quality IS practices in the Pre-K CLASS measure. Data collected included: 1) notes/transcripts from supervisor training meetings (3 total), 2) data binders for teachers including observational fieldnotes (9 per teacher), joint-study/rewriting notes, and notes from discussions with participating teachers at the end of each session; 4) transcripts from supervisor focus-group at the end of the project. The district provided us with all teachers’ Pre-K CLASS scores from November and May of the 2016/2017 school year.
Qualitative data analyses reveal that supervisors found focusing on IS difficult because of other pressing needs/required practices. Quantitative analyses (Mann-Whitney U) revealed no statistically significant difference between the two groups of teachers. However, all but one of the participating teachers showed improvement in their IS scores. Since this was the goal of the district, we determined to continue to work together to refine and revise this approach with the goal of improving the overall process, experience and outcomes of this PD.
Overall this study illustrates that RPPs can address problems of educational practice successfully when researchers/practitioners/district leaders use joint knowledge to inform planning and implementation. This has important implications for the research work that we do in early childhood settings, as it means forging relationships that are ongoing, iterative and continue to evolve and address local problems of practice and rising accountability (Brown & Webber, 2016).

Author

• Katherine Kresin Delaney, University of Toledo