Exploring Early Educator Burnout and its Classroom Correlates in a Statewide Sample

• In Event: Teacher Wellbeing and Young Children’s Classroom Experiences: Exploring Evidence from the Early Grades

Abstract

A growing evidence base indicates that early educators’ psychosocial wellbeing influences their interactions and instruction with children (e.g. Cassidy et al., 2017; Zinsser et al., 2013; Whitaker et al., 2015). Although stress and burnout has featured prominently in the literature on early educator wellbeing, most prior research has examined these facets of wellbeing and their classroom correlates in a limited subset of center-based early education and care (EEC) programs, like Head Start. These types of programs represent a relatively small portion of all EEC settings in the United States (Laughlin, 2013) and there is evidence that the correlates of educator burnout may vary across setting types (e.g., Zinsser et al., 2013).

The present study aims to build upon existing research in three ways. First, it examines the validity of a commonly used measure of educator burnout in a statewide, population-level sample of early education and care in Massachusetts. Second, it uses that validated measure to understand the prevalence and distribution of burnout across the state. Third, it examines associations between educator burnout and observed process quality to generate hypotheses about how to design and target interventions to support educator wellbeing and promote quality.

The study uses data on 647 early educators working in community-based child care, family child care, Head Start, and public school prekindergarten settings serving three- or four-year-old children (see Table 1). Educators in the sample are predominantly White, female, and English speaking. They are on average 47.2 years old (SD = 11.9) and most possess a college degree.

Educators reported a wide range of information about their backgrounds and experiences in an online survey conducted in Spring 2018. Feelings of burnout were measured using the 22-item Maslach Burnout Inventory – Educator Survey (MBI-ES; Maslach et al., 1996). Observational data about process quality are available for a subset of 518 educators in the sample and were gathered using the Child Observation in Preschool and Teacher Observation in Preschool protocols (COP-TOP; Bilbrey et al., 2007; Farran & Anthony, 2014). COP-TOP observations were four hours long and consisted of a series of “sweeps” in which observers documented snapshots of child and adult behaviors.

To examine the validity of the MBI-ES in our statewide sample, we use confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Specifically, we apply CFA to test three specifications of the MBI-ES common in prior validation literature (Worley et al., 2008). Preliminary results indicate the three-factor model achieved the superior fit among the specified models, although no model demonstrated adequate fit across commonly reported statistics (see Table 2). Presently, we are continuing this validation work to determine an appropriate way to capture burnout in our sample.

The final presentation will include the results from descriptive analyses documenting burnout levels and multivariate regression analyses exploring the association between the validated burnout measure and observed process quality, controlling for educator characteristics. We hypothesize that there will be a negative association between burnout and process quality. Implications of this work for efforts to support early educator wellbeing will also be discussed.

Authors

• Madelyn Gardner, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Emily Hanno, MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) - New York City
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stephanie M Jones, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nonie K Lesaux, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  Non-Presenting Author