"I Now Acknowledge My Feelings and Others' Emotions": Supporting Early Childhood Teachers With Mindfulness

• In Event: Early Childhood Professional Well-Being: Multiple Perspectives on Outcomes and Implications From Three Projects

Abstract

Objectives
Early childhood professionals are subject to high levels of stress and burnout and in the United States report greater stress than other educators. Personal and professional stress takes a significant toll on early childhood (EC) teachers, triggering progressive burnout and diminishing their capacity to engage in sensitive, supportive, and responsive caregiving (Hamre & Pianta, 2004; Jeon et al., 2014; Sandilos et al., 2015; Zinsser et al., 2016). Limited literature has focused on the emotion regulation of EC teachers as one way to address the issue of high stress, workplace exhaustion, and education practices. In this presentation we describe the creation of and preliminary evidence of the 8-week Cultivating Healthy Intentional Mindful Educators (CHIME) intervention (N=56), an integrated, mindfulness compassion-based social-emotional learning program.
Theoretical Framework
The adapted and expanded prosocial classroom model (Jennings and Greenberg, 2009) serves as a theoretical basis for CHIME, placing EC teacher emotion regulation and socioemotional learning at the center of the intervention model, with the assumption that, by cultivating mindfulness and compassion, teachers will develop more effective strategies for regulating their emotions and coping with distress, which in turn, will enhance the quality of their interactions with children.
Methods and Data Source
Educators were recruited from center-based programs using a snowball sampling technique. We present findings from a within group study conducted in 2019 of self-report measures of teacher stress, wellbeing, mindfulness, and emotion regulation for 56 educators (identifying primarily as White, 86%, or Black, 3.5%; 53% working in Early Head Start/Head Start). These same measures were collected approximately one to two weeks following the completion of the CHIME intervention.
Results
Approximately 14% (n=8) of the participants dropped out of the program because of the time commitment, not having staff coverage to attend the group, and leaving their place of employment (7% of the participants completed the program but did not complete post-tests). Anxious attachment was significantly associated with many facets of mindfulness, workplace exhaustion, and mental well-being. Table 1 describes the mean scores of participants for measures of mindfulness, emotion regulation, wellbeing and burnout administered pre- and post-CHIME completion. Participants showed an increase in all facets of mindfulness after completing CHIME, with the effect sizes for changes across these scales being large. Similarly, there was a large and positive intervention effect on mental wellbeing. In terms of their emotion regulation, participants reported fewer difficulties with non-acceptance of emotions, goal directed behavior, emotional awareness, using strategies to regulate emotion, and emotional clarity, whereas they did not show a change in their level of difficulty regulating impulsive responses to emotion. Finally, there was a change in participants’ reported levels of burnout on the Maslach Burnout Inventory, although univariate tests showed that this effect was driven by a decrease in emotional exhaustion, with no significant changes in depersonalization or personal accomplishment.
Significance
Findings from this preliminary study indicate that the CHIME intervention is one promising way to promote adaptive emotion regulation skills and wellbeing in EC teachers working in center-based early learning environments.

Authors

• Holly HB, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Carrie Clark, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Gilbert Parra, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Pearl Avari, University of Nebraska - Lincoln