The Mental, Economic, and Job Wellbeing of 1st Grade Teachers Serving Low-Income Students in Tulsa

• In Event: There’s No One to Take Care of Us: The Importance of Teacher Emotional Well-being

Abstract

Introduction

Young children – especially those from preschool through early elementary school, who are still gaining the ability to work independently – rely heavily on their teachers to provide the kinds of high-quality classroom experiences that promote child engagement and learning. High-quality classrooms are typically characterized by sensitive and responsive exchanges between teachers and students, language modeling and feedback that challenges children to develop new skills, support in mastering new concepts, and predictable norms and expectations that promote an organized and well-regulated environment for stimulating teacher-child and peer-to-peer interactions.

A growing body of research increasingly points to teachers’ own well-being as an especially important ingredient for their capacities to provide high-quality classroom experiences (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Much as the research on parenting has found stress and depression, financial strain and food insecurity, and chaos and instability to disrupt a healthy home environment, research on educators has begun to link parallel stressors – teachers’ poor mental, economic, and job well-being – to disruptions in healthy classroom environments and reductions in positive child development (Johnson et al., 2020a; Johnson et al., 2020b; Roorda, Koomen, Spilt, & Oort, 2011).

The current study builds on this emerging research base to document the prevalence of various stressors known to influence classroom quality, in a sample of 1st grade teachers serving low-income students in Tulsa, OK.

Sample and Method

We draw our data from an ongoing, 7-year longitudinal study of low-income children in Tulsa, OK (the Tulsa SEED Study). Tulsa SEED follows a cohort of children who began preschool at age 3 or 4, in 2016-2017; in 2019-2020, study children (N  1,000) were in 1st grade. In every study year, children are directly assessed and parents are surveyed about parental and household functioning and well-being. Additionally, children’s classrooms are observed using a variety of quality measurement tools, and teachers complete surveys on their personal, economic, and job-related experiences and well-being. The current analysis focuses on study children’s 1st grade teachers (N  103), using classroom observation and teacher survey data collected in the spring of 2020.

Preliminary Results

Descriptive results suggest that approximately 26% of the 1st grade teachers in our sample reported experiencing depressive symptoms and 25% reported food insecurity. At the same time, 90% of teachers reported that they look forward to coming to work and would return to their teaching job next year, and a majority report a positive school climate (e.g., 86% agree that the school administration is supportive and encouraging of staff; 87% agree that the principal enforces school rules for student conduct and backs teachers up when needed). Bivariate associations imply that teachers with higher job satisfaction and more positive perceptions of their school’s climate are less likely to report depressive symptoms and food insecurity. We will extend these analyses over the coming months to incorporate additional variables, including teachers’ self-reported executive functioning, wages, and observational data on classroom quality to test how a broader constellation of mental, economic, and job-related well-being factors relate to each other and to observed classroom processes.

Group Authors

The Tulsa SEED Study team

Authors

• Anna D. Johnson, Georgetown University
  Presenting Author

• Deborah A Phillips, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anne Partika, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anne Martin, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sherri L Castle, University of Oklahoma
  Non-Presenting Author