Early Childhood Teachers' Executive Functioning and Mindfulness and Children's Development: Elucidating Contexts for Early Learning

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Almost 11 million children under the age of five spend considerable time in regular early care and education (ECE) arrangements (Child Care Aware of America, 2013), making the role of early childhood teachers crucial to children’s development. Early childhood teachers are key architects who create nurturing and learning climates (Buettner, Jeon, Hur, & Garcia, 2016) and foster young children’s executive functioning and social-emotional development, which have critical implications for success in later life (Blair & Razza, 2007). Despite the importance of early childhood teachers’ role in ECE, teachers’ own cognitive and emotional abilities to solve problems and regulate their emotions, and their associations with children’s executive functioning and social-emotional functioning are less studied. The first aim of this study was to examine the effects of teachers’ cognitive and emotional executive functioning on children’s executive functioning. The second aim was to explore associations between teachers’ mindfulness and children’s social-emotional functioning.

Two different datasets were used to address the research questions. First, teachers’ and children’s executive functioning data are being collected in 2017-2018 from 20 early childhood teachers and their 3- to 4-year-old students (n = 80) in Head Start, public pre-kindergarten, or private child-care centers at two time points. Teachers’ and children’s cognitive executive functioning are measured by two NIH Toolbox tasks that assess cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control and attention (Weintraub et al., 2013). Teachers’ emotional executive functioning is measured by self-report using the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003) and children’s emotional EF is measured by the gift wrapping task (Brock, Rimm-Kaufman, Nathanson, & Grimm, 2009).

Second, teachers’ mindfulness and children’s social-emotional functioning data were collected in 2016 from 54 teachers and their 3- to 4-year-old students (n = 350) in Head Start or private child-care centers at one time point. Teachers’ mindfulness was measured by their self-report on 24 items using the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire-Short Form (Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, & Toney, 2006). Teachers also responded to 30 items from the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation (SCBE-30; LaFreniere & Dumas, 1996). The items measure children’s anxiety/withdrawal, anger/aggression, and social competence. In addition, children’s behavioral self-regulation was directly observed using the Head-to-Toes task (Ponitz et al., 2008).

Preliminary analyses showed that teachers’ inhibitory control and attention were significantly associated with children’s emotional executive functioning, and that teachers’ emotional regulation was associated with children’ cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control and attention. In addition, we found that when teachers reported higher scores on mindfulness awareness and non-reactivity subscales, children’s anxiety/withdrawal scores were lower; when teachers reported higher scores on observing and describing subscales children’s social competence scores were higher; and when teachers reported higher scores on observing and awareness subscales, children’s anger/aggression scores were lower. Teachers’ non-judging mindfulness was also associated with children’s observed behavioral self-regulation.

While these findings are preliminary, they suggest the importance of teachers’ cognitive and emotional abilities to solve problems, to regulate their own emotions, and to implement mindfulness techniques in pre-school settings to facilitate young children’s executive functioning and social-emotional development.

Authors

• Lieny Jeon, Johns Hopkins University

• Sara B. Johnson, Johns Hopkins University