Profiles of Early Childhood Education Teachers’ Practice Before and After Professional Development and Transition Analysis

• In Event: Professional Development

Abstract

The quality of early childhood education (ECE) programs and teachers’ interactions with children are important to academic readiness as well as social-emotional development. In the U.S., researchers and policy makers have put tremendous efforts into improving the quality of ECE programs (e.g., ACF, 2020; Pianta, 2013) and investigating factors contributing to the quality of ECE teaching practice (e.g., Bayly et al, 2021; DiCarlo et al., 2019; Thorpe et al, 2020). Although some intervention programs have positive impacts on ECE teachers’ beliefs and teaching practice (Hamre et al., 2012), these impacts may vary between teachers (Sandilos et al., 2018). The current study used a person-centered approach to identify patterns in teaching practices before and after the National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education (NCRECE) professional development (PD) focused on improving teacher interactions. We also investigated whether the patterns were related to their professional and classroom characteristics.
Our study included 307 ECE teachers recruited from 11 different sites around the U.S. We used latent profile analyses (LPA, Spurk et al., 2020) to identify clusters of teachers with similar patterns on our outcome measures before and after receiving the NCRECE PD. The LPAs were based on three belief and knowledge assessments completed by teachers (Teaching scenarios, Beliefs about intentional teaching, VAIL) and three domains derived from CLASS observations (Emotional Support, Classroom Organization, and Instructional Support).
For each timepoint, we conducted six different LPAs, each extracting between 1 and 6 profiles across the six outcomes of interest. To determine the profiles that best represented performance at each timepoint, we followed the guidelines suggested by Spurk et al. (2020). We decided to focus on a three-profile model for pretest and a three-profile model for posttest, which are illustrated in Figure 1. The numbers and probabilities of teachers transitioning from each pretest profile to each posttest profile are presented in Table 1. Teachers starting in profile PreLow are most likely to transition to profile PostLowAssessment, while teachers starting in profiles PreModerate or PreHighCLASS are most likely to transition to profile PostHigh. Profile PostLowCLASS is almost exclusively composed of teachers starting in profiles PreLow or PreModerate.
We next examined the relation of the pretest and posttest profiles with the NCRECE condition and 16 measures of teacher/classroom characteristics. Because of the large number of relations we examined, we set α = .005 (Greenwald et al., 1996). None of the variables we examined were significantly related to pretest profiles, but we found several relations with posttest profiles. Those receiving the PD were more likely to be in PostHigh while those in the control condition were more likely to be in PostLowCLASS or PostLowAssessment. We also observed that teachers in PostLowAssessment had fewer years of experience, lower income-to-needs ratios, more authoritarian teaching beliefs, and lower evaluations from their instructors than teachers in PostHigh or PostLowCLASS. These findings support the value of the NCRECE PD at improving intentional teaching and highlight the distinction between knowledge and practice. We will discuss possible implications for professional development in the ECE field.

Authors

• Hyun-Joo Jeon, University of Nevada, Reno
  Presenting Author

• Jamie DeCoster, University of Virginia