Early Childhood Teacher Workplace Stress and Classroom Practices

• In Event: The Well-Being of Early Childhood Teachers and Practice Implications for Promoting Child Development

Abstract

Introduction: Teaching is highly stressful due to many competing demands placed on teachers (Grayson & Alvarez, 2008; Tsai, Fung, & Chow, 2006). Given COVID-19, now more than ever, early childhood teachers struggle with the pressures of maintaining a safe classroom environment for children while balancing the need to preserve the traditional child-directed focus of early education. (Zero to Three, 2020). For most children, teacher practices support foundational developmental skills (Shonkoff, 2000). Therefore, it is essential to determine how teacher stress impacts classroom practices and ways to mitigate stress and increase support so teachers can maintain a nurturing environment. The purpose of the current study was to examine the effectiveness of an adapted version of Infant/Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (Jump Start) on reducing childcare teachers’ stress and examine associations between teacher stress and observed classroom practices.
Hypotheses: We expected that childcare teachers receiving Jump Start would show significant reductions in job stress over time, which would predict better classroom practices. Additionally, we expected that greater teacher-reported stress would be associated with lower observed classroom organization and lower observed implementation of positive social-emotional practices, given prior research suggesting that greater teacher stress was associated with greater difficulty in managing child behaviors. Finally, we expected that lower teacher-reported job stress (i.e., Job Demand, Job Resources, Job Control) at baseline would predict better observed classroom organization, behavior management, and social-emotional practices at the end of the year.
Sample: 173 childcare centers located in Miami-Dade County participated in the study. Childcare providers were 70% Hispanic and 18% Non-Hispanic Black.
Methods: Data were collected as part of the Jump Start program over a 6-month period with the goal of improving centers’ capacity to address challenging behaviors. Measures collected at baseline (T1) and 6-months post-intervention (T2) included the Childcare Worker Job Stress Inventory (Curbow et al., 2001), a teacher self-report measure, and two observational measures of classroom practices, the Health Environment Rating Scale (HERS; Natale et al., 2020) and the CLASS (Pianta, La Paro, Hamre, 2004).
Results: Table 1 shows correlations between stress and classroom practices at T1 and T2. Table 2 shows differences in teacher-reported stress from baseline (T1) to post (T2). Regression analyses revealed that reductions in stress related to Job Demands (B=-0.184, p<.05) and Job Control (B=-0.167, p<.05) predicted teachers’ social-emotional practices on the Infant Mental Health scale of the HERS at T2. Reductions in Job Demand stress (B=-0.13, p=.07) were associated with positive Behavior Management Practices at T2. The greater Job Control that teachers reported at T1 predicted more positive Behavior Management practices at T2 (B= 0.249, p<.01). The perceived Job Resources teachers reported at T1 predicted their level of Classroom Organization at T2 (B=0.289, p=.05).
Findings suggested that providing mental health consultation to address teacher stressors (i.e., job demand, job control, and job resources) may be an important first step in improving quality classroom practices in early education settings, particularly those practices that support children’s social-emotional and behavioral development.

Authors

• Ruby Natale, University of Miami
  Presenting Author

• Ellen Kolomeyer, University of Miami School of Medicine/Mailman Center for Child Development
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rebecca J. Bulotsky Shearer, University of Miami
  Non-Presenting Author