Exploring Links Among Leadership, Teacher Well-Being, and Teacher-Child Interactions

• In Event: The Role and Impact of Leadership Development, Well-Being, and Practice in Early Care and Education

Abstract

High-quality early care and education (ECE) can lead to positive short- and long-term outcomes for children and provides much-needed care for working families. While teachers are the most important driver of care quality (Hamre, 2014), they are often underpaid and face unique workplace stressors that impact their well-being (McLean et al., 2021). Between 25-35% of ECE teachers experience clinically-significant levels of depressive symptoms (Authors, 2021b; Moiduddin et al., 2017), and studies have linked well-being with both teachers’ interactions with children and children’s developmental outcomes (Authors, 2019; Buettner et al., 2016; Zinsser et al., 2013).

ECE leaders are one of teachers’ most direct supports, and as such are increasingly being explored as a potentially important driver of workplace well-being. Although limited, research suggests that teachers’ work environments, including their relationship with their supervisor, are associated with well-being (Henry et al., 2021; Jeon et al., 2018) and classroom quality (Ehrlich et al., 2018; McCormick Center, 2010). However, no studies have examined whether leadership specifically is related to well-being, despite well-being’s key role in these job-related outcomes.

The present study addresses these questions using survey data from 429 teachers working in formal ECE settings (Head Start, child care centers, pre-K programs) in two large Louisiana parishes in 2018. Teachers self-reported their well-being (job satisfaction and depressive symptoms) as well as their perceptions of site leaders using the Early Ed Essentials Leadership Scales, a validated measure of leadership quality in early childhood settings (Ehrlich et al., 2018). Surveys were linked with a fall 2018 observational measure of teacher-child interactions (Classroom Assessment Scoring System, CLASS).

To account for the potential of shared method variance to inflate associations between leadership and teacher outcomes, each regression was run twice. In one model we used a traditional measure where each teacher’s perceptions of their leader predicted their own outcomes (job satisfaction, depressive symptoms, CLASS scores). In a second model, the mean perceptions of leadership from all other teachers at a site were used to predict a teacher’s outcomes (Authors, 2023b). That is, a teacher’s own perceptions of leadership did not contribute to their leadership score. All models included a rich set of covariates (Table 2.1), and standard errors were clustered at the site level.

We find that on average teachers’ perception of their leaders are positive, and that about 20% of the variance in perceptions of leadership was at the site level. While a teachers’ individual perceptions of leadership were statistically significantly linked to both job satisfaction and depressive symptoms, they were not linked to CLASS scores (Table 2.2). Site-level perceptions of leadership were not linked to any teacher outcomes.

Findings suggest that teachers’ individual perceptions are linked to their well-being, but that teacher characteristics may be driving this relationship. Next steps include running more rigorous models, including the addition of a lagged CLASS score and director-level covariates, and exploring covariates that may indicate workplace mechanisms linking leadership to well-being. We will also test for mediation between leadership and teacher-child interactions.

Authors

• Anna J. Markowitz, University of California - Los Angeles

• Tammy Yabiku, University of California - Los Angeles