Teachers' perceptions of well-being and involvement in preschool children

ABSTRACT

Well-being indicates that one is doing well emotionally and feeling comfortable with oneself as a person. A low level of well-being signals that a child is not succeeding in fulfilling his/her fundamental needs, such as eating, being hugged, physical contact, a more or less predictable environment, feeling accepted and feeling like he or she is a ‘good’ person. An involved child concentrates his/her attention on a specific focus, wants to continue the activity and to persist in it and is rarely, if ever, distracted. In this qualitative research, we focus on the well-being and involvement levels of children according to circle time activities and on how teachers react when children have low levels of well-being. The data consist of observations covering a total of 76 children from five different classes and focus-group interviews with seven teachers from these classrooms. The questions for the focus-group interview were prepared by the researchers. The tool focuses on two central indicators of quality early-years provision: children's ‘well-being’ and ‘involvement’. The findings show us that teachers consider body language, facial and verbal expressions to be the main criteria for well-being. Children's involvement is considered to be built on both motivation and the impulse to explore. From the observation findings, we could see the children's state of well-being with the ‘relaxation & inner peace’ indicator and that children mostly showed their involvement by exhibiting motivation in their work.

KEYWORDS:

• Well-being
• involvement
• circle time
• preschool teachers

Notes on contributors

Sibel Sönmez is working as an assistant professor in Ege University Faculty of Education. She graduated in Nursing in 1993, she done her PhD Child Health and Illnesses Nursing in 2002. Dr Sönmez teaches parent education, health promoting schools and projects, children at-risk (poverty and well-being), maternal and child health, maternal and child nutrition, community service applications, research project and practice in schools.

Burcu Ceylan was born on 10.08.1990 in The Netherlands. She studied ‘Pedagogy’ at the ‘Hogeschool van Amsterdam’ in The Netherlands. She is a Master student ‘Preschool Education’ at the ‘Ege University’ in İzmir/Turkey. She is interested in developing the general well-being in young children in every area where a child is involved, such parent–child interaction, teacher–child interaction. Thereby, developing creativity with activities in children is another interest area.