The wellbeing of early care educators is essential for lessening burnout and increasing teachers' intentions of staying in the field. Protective factors related to the wellbeing of early care educators in the field have been given little attention in research and practice but have such a profound impact on programs, classrooms, children, and…

The mentoring and evaluating process enhances quality of teachers' serving in early childhood programs. The Early Educator Support (EES) Program is a new model of mentoring and coaching that aims to lend support to PreK teachers' working in nonpublic school settings. In this qualitative study, we examined the lived experiences of 12 mentors and…

Kindergarten Entry Assessments (KEAs) have grown in popularity over the past decade due to the Race to the Top -- Early Learning Challenge Grant offered by the U.S. Department of Education in 2015. This study addresses kindergarten teachers' perceptions of data from North Carolina's school readiness assessment and their perceptions of what…

This study used a modified mixed-method sequential explanatory design to explore how preschool teachers perceive and use complex talk within different activity settings and content areas to facilitate language and literacy skills. The combination of large-scale, quantitative data (455 children, 63 teachers) from a pre-K study and in-depth,…

This grounded theory study seeks to 1) understand what barriers North Carolina kindergarten teachers experience as they implement a new authentic formative assessment, the North Carolina Early Learning Inventory (NC ELI), and 2) identify factors that increase implementation fidelity with the new measure. Data were collected from 10 teachers, from…

To support the increasing numbers of Chinese language programs in the United States, there is a need to recruit and support highly qualified teachers. In this study, we described an online professional learning community (PLC) among a small group of Kindergarten Chinese teachers. All the teachers were visiting teachers with prior teaching…

Barriers and supports to nutrition education in the early childhood classroom are most often presented from in-service teachers' perspective. Little work has been done to understand pre-service early childhood educators' perceptions of barriers and supports before entering the classroom. The purpose of this study was to identify early childhood…

Research Findings: The present study examined the transition practices reported by 59 pre-kindergarten (pre-k) and 186 kindergarten teachers in the rural Southeastern United States, and asked if transition practices related to skills at the beginning and end of kindergarten for 387 children. Analyses indicated kindergarten teachers offered more…

The personal and professional outcomes of experiential wilderness-based professional development programs for K-12 educators have not been adequately evaluated. This study used open-ended survey questions to identify a range of personal (i.e., self-awareness, new perspectives, self-confidence) and professional (i.e., changes in classroom…

Advancing Social-Communication and Play (ASAP) is a classroom-based intervention targeting the social-communication and play development of preschool-age children with autism spectrum disorder. We used a multimethod approach to measuring intervention fidelity, including adherence, exposure, treatment differentiation, and quality of treatment…

Our study examined the relationship between improved personal health behaviors of Head Start teachers and the promotion of positive health behaviors in their classrooms. Thirty-three Head Start teachers across seven centers received six 30-min nutrition education lessons. Dietary intake, physical activity, and self-efficacy for promoting positive…

Spurred by the 1986 IDEA reauthorization, the movement toward collaborative, or blended, preservice early childhood personnel preparation now spans an impressive 30-year history. In this paper, we trace the evolution of blended preparation by applying a conceptual framework that situates the development of blended program identity within a…

This timely book will help policymakers and practitioners convert their visions of high-quality early education into on-the-ground reality by providing a much-needed, richly detailed look at how states can design, fund, and manage exemplary programs. The authors describe and analyze how four states--Michigan, West Virginia, Washington, and North…

This study evaluates how teacher report measures align with different conceptualizations of children's social-emotional development. Leveraging seven teacher report measures of social competence and behavioral regulation in a predominantly low-income, population-based rural sample of four-year-old children (n = 828), model fit and validity were…

This study aimed to understand early childhood pre-service teachers' thoughts and experiences with nutrition education in their undergraduate program and how these experiences play into their perceptions and future use of nutrition education within their own classrooms. Using phenomenology, 11 in-depth telephonic interviews were conducted with…