Abstract
Paper 1: The relationships between children and their teachers are crucial for their social-emotional development and academic achievement. Effort control, an important self-regulation skill during preschool, is often linked to teacher-child interactions. However, research often overlooks the impact of implicit racial associations on Black children in early childhood education, leading to findings reported from a deficit perspective and failing to consider developmental variability and the heterogeneity of Black children. This study leverages data collected from 346 Black families, with 4-year-old children in publicly funded preschool programs, to investigate the relationship between preschoolers’ effortful control and their positive and conflictual teacher interactions. Further, it explores key sociocultural contexts, such as emotional support at school and home-based family involvement in education, as protective factors that may moderate the proposed association between effortful control and Black children’s interactions with teachers. Research Findings: Unexpectedly, effortful control was not associated with teacher-child interactions. Additionally, family home-based involvement did not moderate the relationship between effortful control and teach-child interactions; however, classroom emotional support did moderate the link between effortful control and positive teacher-child interactions.
Paper 2: Self-regulation is critical to preschoolers’ success in early childhood classrooms, and its absence can result in disruptive behavior. Children enter early education with varying self-regulation skills, which creates challenges for teachers. There is growing evidence that teachers’ self-efficacy may play a role in how well they implement strategies for managing classrooms and supporting behavioral development. And, although Bandura's social-cognitive theory identifies four common sources of self-efficacy (mastery, vicarious, verbal persuasion, and emotional experiences), little is known about how these contribute to early educators’ self-efficacy for supporting self-regulation and whether behavioral consultation provides some of these experiences. The current study used a qualitative methods approach to address these gaps in the literature through interviews with thirteen preschool teachers supporting children in Head Start classrooms. The study first explored teachers’ experiences managing and supporting children's social-emotional development and then analyzed different self-efficacy-promotive experiences. Finally, the study investigated whether teachers receiving mental health consultation report a greater number and wider variety of experiences that bolster self-efficacy compared to those teachers in a business-as-usual control group.
Paper 3: When teachers are experiencing high levels of well-being, they are more capable of offering emotional support to their classroom, which in turn enhances student engagement, behaviors, and academic achievement (Jennings et al., 2017). Furthermore, teachers sharing minoritized status backgrounds can reduce emotional stress, allow for better understanding between them and their students, and improve job satisfaction (Costa et al., 2021) and competence (Recknagel et al., 2021). This study examines the intricate dynamics of teacher well-being and classroom climate, under conditions of minoritized status matching between teachers and their classroom. It draws from the prosocial classroom model and the integrative model for the study of developmental competencies in minority children to explore the link between teacher well-being and emotional support in diverse classroom settings. Additionally, the study incorporates self-determination theory to understand teacher well-being, as defined by the integration of autonomy, competence, and close relationships. At the same time, it addresses the influences of minoritized status matching between teachers and their classroom on teachers’ well-being in relation to classroom emotional support. By expanding on the prosocial classroom model and integrating the conceptualization of developmental competencies in minority children, the research aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the experiences of minoritized students in elementary school settings from a strengths-based perspective.
