Toward a Coherent Approach to Early Childhood Education Teacher Well-Being: A Systematic Review of the Literature

• In Event: Teacher Well-Being in Early Childhood Education: Essential Lessons From Large-Scale Studies

Abstract

Teachers have consistently reported high levels of stress, anxiety, and burnout (Greenberg et al., 2016; Weingarten et al., 2017), particularly those who work with younger children (Whitaker et al., 2015). With robust links between positive teacher wellbeing and children’s academic and social success (Carroll et al., 2021, Collie et al., 2012; Grayson & Alvarez, 2008), the current paper aims to understand effective preventative and intervention tools to promote teacher wellbeing in such contexts through a systematic, cross-disciplinary review.

Unlike a meta-analysis aiming to show the average effects of one construct on another, a systematic review critiques the literature as a whole, facilitating the discovery of (in)consistencies in how essential outcomes are conceptualized, measured, analyzed, and interpreted. Systematic reviews also highlight gaps in the knowledge base to guide future work (Gopalakrishnan & Ganeshkumar, 2013; Slavin, 1995).

Our systematic review explores five questions in the teacher wellbeing literature in ECE and beyond:
(1) What specific outcomes have teacher wellbeing interventions targeted?
(2) What research methodologies have teacher wellbeing intervention studies employed?
(3) Broadly, what strategies and experiences have emerged as supportive of wellbeing?
(4) What challenges to intervention effectiveness have emerged across studies?
(5) Where are the most pressing gaps in the intervention literature?

Method involves searching peer-reviewed, published studies since 2007 (15 years) to collect interventions targeting one or more wellbeing outcome (e.g., psychological distress, coping skills) using a variety of keywords and databases (e.g., PsychInfo, ERIC, WorldCat, Web of Science).

Results of preliminary searches revealed:

Question 1: Research has focused on individual-level indicators of adverse wellbeing (e.g., stress, anxiety, depression, burnout), as well as ensuing consequences (absenteeism, turnover), with less focus on positive features of wellbeing (engagement, coping, pride, self-efficacy, competence, perceived social value of work). Early childhood education has received less attention compared to other fields.

Question 2: There has been a preponderance of pre-post, within-person change models, with relatively few randomized controlled trials. Qualitative work centers on one-time interviews and focus groups, but few in-depth, longitudinal examinations. Large-scale work is rare.

Question 3: Effective interventions tend to be longer (up to one year), embedded in the workplace, delivered by a content expert, and at least partly focused on mindfulness or other cognitive approaches (perhaps an “active ingredient”). Several mediators/moderators of intervention effectiveness have been explored at the individual (e.g., initial wellbeing) or organizational level (e.g., school auspices, total workplace stressors).

Question 4: Major challenges pertain to recruitment and retention. Participant fidelity to intended activities may be low particularly if they are time-consuming (e.g., meditating for 40 minutes/day) or involve a technological burden (e.g., completing online modules).

Question 5: The ECE field needs simultaneous examination of individual (workload, baseline wellbeing) and contextual (school culture) mediators/moderators of teacher wellbeing, which may be best accomplished through large-scale studies with strong statistical power.

Significance: This study sets up the large-scale, ECE-focuses studies that follow, introducing key constructs of interest and foreshadowing how the studies to come fill an important niche in our knowledge base.

Authors

• Annemarie H. Hindman, Temple University
  Presenting Author

• Lia E. Sandilos, Lehigh University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Linlin Wang
  Non-Presenting Author