Training pre-service teachers to better serve LGBTQ high school students

ABSTRACT

Pre-service teachers rarely receive training on how best to serve lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) high school students. We tested whether participating in LGBTQ-focused service-based learning or LGBTQ-focused didactic training improved pre-service teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy, and skills for serving LGBTQ high school students more than a control group. A non-randomised pre-test-post-test design with eighty-eight participants tested these differences. At post-test, the service-based learning group had significantly higher active-empathic listening and self-efficacy for working with LGBTQ high school students than the control group. There were no differences for didactic versus control groups. Overall, service-based learning may better prepare pre-service teachers to serve LGBTQ high school students.

KEYWORDS:

• Lesbian
• gay
• bisexual
• transgender
• queer
• quasi-experimental study
• pre-service teacher training

Acknowledgments

We thank the leaders at THRIVE of Southwest PA for their hard work in creating and implementing the intervention programmes. We also thank the study participants for the information they shared. We also thank the professors who allowed us to recruit undergraduate students from their classrooms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the William T. Green Jr. Award in Public Health Studies from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health; the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grant number F31DA037647; the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the NIH under grant number TL1TR001858; and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism under grant number K01AA027564. The funding agencies were not involved in the study design, analysis or interpretation of data, the writing of the report, or the decision to submit for publication. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the University of Pittsburgh or the National Institutes of Health