Exploring Associations between Pre-COVID Classroom Quality and During-COVID Teacher Functioning

• In Event: Educating the Youngest Learners During the Pandemic: The Impacts of COVID-19 on Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Most experts agree that the definition of quality in early education and elementary grade classrooms includes instructional support that encourages concept development and growth of new skills, emotional support, and organizational management where behavioral norms and expectations are clearly communicated to promote a well-regulated classroom environment (Pianta, Downer, & Hamre, 2016). These are the 3 domains captured by one of the most widely-used observational instruments for measuring quality in pre-k through 3rd grade classrooms – the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). When COVID spread throughout the country in spring 2020, many school districts ceased in-person instruction and moved to a distance learning (DL) model in which children received all of their instruction online, via a mix of live and recorded sessions. Thus the pressing question today for policymakers, school district leaders, educators, and parents, is what constitutes – and predicts – “classroom quality” in the DL environment that characterizes school for most young students during COVID. The current study – which investigates relationships between the observed quality of teachers’ classrooms before COVID and teacher functioning during COVID – takes a first step toward tackling this novel and emerging question. To the extent that pre-COVID observed classroom quality associates with during-COVID teacher functioning, it may illuminate potential proxies for teaching quality during pandemic-induced DL.

We capitalize on data from an ongoing longitudinal study of low-income children in Tulsa, OK (Tulsa SEED). Tulsa SEED has followed a cohort of children beginning in preschool in 2016-2017; when COVID struck in March 2020, study children (N1,000) were completing 1st grade. In each study year, in addition to directly assessing sample children and interviewing their parents, the SEED study has also surveyed children’s teachers and observed their classrooms using the CLASS. Classroom observations and teacher surveys had just been completed before the Tulsa Public Schools district closed on March 16, 2020. Between May and the first week of July, 2020, we surveyed children’s 1st grade teachers again, this time about their experiences during DL. In the current analysis we use the “pre-COVID” classroom and teacher data collected shortly before the school district closed, to predict teachers’ engagement during DL (N55 teachers). Pre-COVID teacher-reported data include teacher demographic information and classroom composition variables, as well as teachers’ self-reported executive functioning, job satisfaction, and perception of positive school climate. Pre-COVID classroom observation data include the 3 domains from the CLASS: instructional support, emotional support, and classroom management. During-COVID teacher functioning is operationalized as teachers’ responses to questions about average time spent per week on planning, live and recorded remote teaching, and communicating with parents and children.

Results from OLS regression models suggest that, after controlling for teacher demographics and classroom composition variables, higher scores on observed classroom instructional support predicted more time spent live remote teaching and more total teaching time, while higher observed classroom emotional support scores predicted the opposite. Teacher job satisfaction positively predicted time spent planning for remote teaching, time spent pre-recording remote teaching, and total teaching time, while teacher executive functioning predicted less time spent live remote teaching.

Group Authors

The Tulsa SEED Study Team

Authors

• Anna D. Johnson, Georgetown University
  Presenting Author

• Owen Schochet, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anne Martin, Georgetown University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sherri L Castle, University of Oklahoma
  Non-Presenting Author