“Saying What You Think:” An Online Conversation-based Professional Development Intervention in Urban Head Start Programs

• In Event: Meeting Early Childhood Educators Where They are: Professional Development Innovations to Enhance Quality Classroom Experiences

Abstract

Young children’s conversations robustly predict their language-related skills. Pupils converse with teachers in Early Childhood Education (ECE) settings, but also with peers. Indeed, peer interactions occur more frequently. Fostering the conversation quality in ECE classrooms that serve culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) learners is particularly challenging for teachers in the U.S. because this is not a required component of most training programs. Despite increasingly diverse ECE settings, professional development programs of this kind are also scarce. Consequently, many teachers are underprepared to support young CALD learners’ linguistic skills. This study piloted the Conversation Compass©, a 6-week self-paced training that targets the conversational discourse in classrooms. Unlike most of the previous training programs that focus broadly on one-on-one conversations with the teachers, Conversation Compass© equips teachers with strategies to facilitate joint conversations with CALD learners. Informed by theories of effective interactions, this program targets three aspects of conversational discourse. First, strategies to promote group conversations following children’s lead so that they have opportunities to use their communicative repertoires and practice interactional skills with peers. Second, strategies to formulate challenging open-ended questions that engage the group members in the conversation. Finally, the program focuses on strategies to use inferential talk, which requires the use of higher-order thinking. Ten Head Start teachers and 101 preschool-age children (46% female) from multilingual and multiracial classrooms participated in this study; on average, 62% of the students per classroom were CALD learners.

Using a pretest-posttest design, this study examined 40 conversational sessions of approximately 10 minutes each, before and after teachers completed the Conversation Compass©. These sessions were transcribed using the CHAT program and were examined in terms of (a) the balance of the teacher-children turn-taking; (b) the level of complexity of teachers’ questions that required pupils to inform, analyze, or brainstorm on the discussed topic; and (c) the use of inferential talk defined as the use of mental state words.

Paired t-test analyses showed that after the training, teachers facilitated significantly (p < .05) more enriched joint conversations with CALD learners. Relative to the pretest, in the posttest, teachers used more brainstorming questions and the teacher-children turn-taking was more balanced. Though teachers’ use of inferential talk was relatively stable before and after the training, children used significantly more of this talk in the posttest, suggesting that their contribution to conversations was more elaborated. The effect sizes of these differences were moderate (range = 0.55 to 1.68). These results suggest that the conversational discourse in classrooms with CALD learners can be targeted by professional development programs and, notably, that the Conversation Compass© is a promising one. This program honors children’s backgrounds, leverages the peer role, and is relatively easy to implement and scale up. It involves a teacher-friendly workbook and an asynchronous online course that can be completed in a short time. Future studies should use more stringent research designs to evaluate this program’s effects on children’s learning and examine whether these effects are moderated by the individual characteristics of CALD learners.

Authors

• Johana Chaparro-Moreno, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Stephanie Michelle Curenton, Boston University

• Jacqueline P. Sims, Boston University

• Niya Adlersberg

• Sabrina Huang