What Are the Elements of Leadership in Center-based Early Care and Education Settings?

• In Event: Improving our Lens: Innovative Measures for Understanding Early Childhood Classrooms, Leaders, and Transitions

Abstract

Leadership is widely recognized as an essential driver of organizational performance and improvement. However, information is lacking on how to define key constructs associated with leadership in center-based early care and education (ECE) settings and the activities that demonstrate leadership. Additionally, little is known about the role of leadership in improving quality and outcomes for staff and children (Kirby et al., 2021).

The Early Care and Education Leadership Study (ExCELS) aims to fill the definitional gaps to understand what leadership looks like and to develop a new measure of ECE leadership. ExCELS is using a broad definition of leadership to include all manager roles and teaching staff who participate in decision-making and quality improvement in center-based ECE settings. Informed by the literature and guided by the theory of change (Figure 1), we developed the measure of leadership within an ECE center to comprise three elements: (1) who leaders are, looking at who participates in decision-making about the care and education of young children; (2) what leaders bring, including values and beliefs related to the care and education of young children and operations of the center; and (3) what leaders do, including providing support for high quality practices, promoting coordination among staff and with families, creating a shared vision, and managing efficient operations.

In this presentation, we will describe how we developed a new measure of leadership in ECE center-based settings and report the findings on the psychometric properties of the measure. We recruited a purposive sample of over 100 ECE centers serving children from birth to age 5 from four states that varied in federal funding source (from Head Start and/or Child Care and Development Fund [CCDF]), center size, and geographic area that is critical for psychometric validation. Table 1 presents the preliminary results on center characteristics. The data collection involved self-administered surveys of center managers (two per center, on average) and all teaching staff within centers.

We will describe the results of the analysis investigating the reliability and validity of the new measure. We will present findings about the reliability of the leadership elements based on Rasch analysis and calculations of Cronbach’s alphas. We will present findings from confirmatory factor analysis and Rasch analysis to determine construct validity for each element of the leadership measure and differential item functioning analysis to assess any potential bias in the items. In addition, we will assess the concurrent validity by examining the correlations between the ExCELS leadership elements (based on teaching staff and center manager reports) and center culture, climate, and communication as measured using the Essential 0-5 Survey (Ehrlich et al., 2018) reported by teaching staff.

The development of the ECE leadership measure will make an important contribution to the field. We will discuss how it can be used for research to understand leadership, for evaluation of leadership quality improvement initiatives, and to identify professional development needs of ECE managers and teaching staff. We will highlight next steps for measurement development.

Authors

• Yange Xue, Mathematica Policy Research - New Jersey
  Presenting Author

• Gretchen Kirby, Mathematica

• Lizabeth Malone, Mathematica Policy Research - District of Columbia

• Anne L. Douglass, University of Massachusetts Boston