Improving Early Care and Education Professionals’ Teaching Self-Efficacy and Well-Being: A Mixed Methods Exploratory Study

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: Early care and education (ECE) professionals experience a myriad of challenges that adversely impact their well-being as well as their ability to have the greatest teaching impact on the children they serve. There is general agreement that Professional Development (PD) can improve teaching practices. The current study examined the impact of a PD experience that included both adaptive work (e.g., addressing educators’ existing strengths, challenges, belief systems, stress levels, and self-care) and technical training (e.g., strategies for addressing children’s challenging behavior). This PD experience was implemented with 62 ECE professionals living on the islands of Hawai’i over 10 weeks and consisted of in-person sessions, web-based sessions, and a community of practice. Findings from this study suggest high ratings of effectiveness of the PD experience and positive improvements in ECE professionals’ ratings of their teaching self-efficacy and well-being. Practice or Policy: The results from this study suggest that PD incorporating adaptive work can improve teaching self-efficacy and could be implemented as part of every PD session. PD that incorporates an emphasis on teachers’ well-being and actively strives to promote their well-being may be as important to ECE professionals as some other strategies targeted to improve work environments and classroom quality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Work reported in this manuscript was supported in part with funds from the Native Hawaiian Education Program provided through the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Award #S362A150002.