Stable roles, changed skills: teacher candidate responses to instruction about adolescent psychosocial support practices

Abstract

By virtue of their day-to-day contact with students, teachers are uniquely positioned to notice and respond to student psychosocial issues, both mental health problems and issues like peer harassment that can contribute to mental health problems. Yet, teachers’ opportunities to learn about providing psychosocial support remain scattered. The present study investigates the impact of one teacher education program’s efforts to promote productive teacher interactions with students experiencing psychosocial issues. The intervention – a six-week module that comprised part of a master’s-level teacher education practicum support course – aimed to increase candidates’ ability to recognize and respond to student psychosocial issues in the classroom. This study’s pre-test/post-test design asked 72 candidates to respond to vignettes portraying situations of student psychosocial distress, and also gauged candidates’ preference for working with populations experiencing psychosocial distress. Pre- to posttest change was gauged first with a rubric and then compared using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. While candidates’ sense of their preferred role responsibilities regarding work with students experiencing psychosocial distress did not change, their demonstrated knowledge and practice skills in specific areas related to student psychosocial issues, particularly consultation and referral, did. Implications for teacher education regarding student support needs, and school-based mental health practice that engages teachers, are discussed.

Keywords:

• Teachers and student mental health
• teacher education
• teacher support of students
• psychosocial support of students

Notes

1. We use the terms ‘psychosocial issues’ and ‘psychosocial stressors’ purposefully, to denote experiences in young people’s lives which may not necessarily represent mental health issues or problems, but which stand to contribute to mental health problems, depending on young people’s interfaces with family and community, the availability of concrete and emotional supports, and cultural norms. Examples of psychosocial stressors are included in this paper’s first paragraph.

2. The survey questions about prior coursework and experiences were not repeated as part of the post-test. Only the vignette prompts and survey questions about overall feeling and preference were repeated.

3. Table 3 indicates the mean scores and standard deviations on the pre- and post-tests for each of the five knowledge/skill areas. Table 4 demonstrates which of the mean score changes between pre and post-test were statistically significant.