Poster #62 - Well-being First: Culturally Sensitive Approach for Head Start Teachers’ Holistic Well-being

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

Due to various challenges to educators’ well-being in early care and education (ECE) work environment, such as low wages, limited support, and increased job demands, the field is going through chronic workforce shortages and high turnover (Whitebook et al., 2014). Particularly, Head Start (HS) educators are likely to experience additional challenges, such as secondary traumatic stress, as they often work with children experiencing trauma (Lawson et al., 2019). Gallagher et al. (2022) suggest that ECE educators’ well-being is shaped through interactions among individual-, environmental-, and system-level factors. Therefore, it is important to simultaneously address educators’ needs in various dimensions through multifaceted approaches in intervention efforts.

Using Gallagher et al.’s (2022) framework, we designed the “Well-Being First (WBF),” an intervention promoting HS educators’ well-being. WBF is composed of a training series (e.g., health behaviors, social-emotional competences, resilience), collaborative group processing, leadership support, monthly consultation, and well-being toolkits. Each component is adapted from multiple evidence-based strategies in education and human services. Notably, the intervention is tailored to be best aligned with goals and expectations of educators and programs in different contexts. This allows culturally sensitive approaches to addressing educators’ context-specific needs. Altogether, WBF aims to simultaneously improve educators’ personal well-being and each program’s organizational well-being (Figure 1).

The purpose of this presentation is to introduce the theoretical framework and preliminary findings of WBF. We investigated: 1) How much changes do WBF bring to personal and organizational well-being among HS educators?; and 2) To what extent are participants satisfied with WBF?

We recruited 22 HS educators in a mid-Atlantic city for the pilot phase. Demographic characteristics and current states of well-being among participants are presented in Table 1. The goal of this pilot phase is to gather feedback from the participants and improve intervention contents prior to a randomized controlled trial. Therefore, no control group was recruited. An introductory session was provided in September 2022, which incorporated the pre-intervention assessment (an online survey). Data on educators’ physical, psychological, financial, and professional/organizational well-being were collected (Bloom et al., 1991; Cohen et al., 1983; Emlen et al., 2000; La Salle et al., 2016; McKay & Avery, 2015; Stamm, 2009). All-staff training (three full-day monthly online training sessions) will be implemented and end in February 2023. After the completion of the sessions, we will collect post-test data which will be used to present the preliminary findings of the pilot program in this presentation. A single-group pre-post design will be used for the analysis. Given the sample size, we will conduct repeated-measures t-tests to compare educators’ well-being states before and after WBF.

In this pre-registration, we hypothesize that WBF will improve HS educators’ well-being knowledge, resilience, and competencies, and organizational well-being of HS programs. Furthermore, examining the effectiveness of WBF will ultimately help us identify comprehensive, collaborative, and culturally sensitive strategies to improve the holistic well-being of HS educators. We developed a syntax to clean the pre-test data and the same syntax will be used to expedite the process of data analysis for the conference presentation.

Authors

• Sooyeon Byun, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Presenting Author

• Xiangyu Zhao, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Ebony Danielle Leon, University of Virginia

• Amy Roberts, University of Denver

• Lieny Jeon, University of Virginia - Charlottesville