Communication with families: Understanding the perspectives of early childhood teachers

Communication between teachers and families in early childhood is a key aspect of successful teacher-family engagement. The goal of this exploratory study was to investigate how teachers communicated with families in early childhood classrooms and what they communicated about. This study of 31 teachers working with children birth to age five, primarily in the Midwestern U.S. examined how they described communication with families using semi-structured interviews. Findings indicated that teachers used multiple formats to communicate with families about children’s daily routines, developmental progress, and other relevant information. Teachers preferred in-person communication although challenges occurred due to classroom dynamics and the global COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. Technology such as apps and messaging emerged as an efficient way to reach most families, however difficulties facilitating reciprocal communication with families were described. Further research is needed to identify successful communication strategies for both teachers and families, thus building higher quality teacher-family partnerships

Promising Findings that the Cultivating Healthy Intentional Mindful Educators’ Program (CHIME) Strengthens Early Childhood Teachers’ Emotional Resources: An Iterative Study

Findings suggest that an eight-week mindfulness compassion-based program, Cultivating Healthy Intentional Mindful Educators (CHIME), is a feasible professional development intervention for early childhood (EC) teachers to support their emotion regulation and psychological and workplace well-being. We offer preliminary evidence that learning about mindfulness, self-compassion, and social-emotional learning supports EC teachers in strengthening their knowledge and application of practices to be more mindful and less emotionally reactive and emotionally exhausted at work. In analyzing both EC teacher feedback and survey data from two pilot studies, there was promising evidence that participating in CHIME enhanced awareness of emotions and the development of strategies to manage emotions. As CHIME is further developed and refined it will be integral to have collaborative engagement and participation from EC teachers and programs to ensure that learning these practices are relevant, helpful, meaningful, and sustainable

See Beyond the Child’s Behavior to the Heart”: Examining Early Childhood Educator’s Experiences with a Mindfulness-Based Intervention to Reduce Psychological Distress and Workplace Stress

Educators are crucial to the development and learning outcomes of children in early childhood settings. However, early childhood educators are often stressed and experience lower well-being due to multifaceted teaching and non-teaching task demands. To address the national concern of a stressed educator workforce, recent efforts have included using mindfulness-based interventions with educators in K-12 settings. The current study examined how participation in a mindfulness-based intervention impacted early childhood educators’ mindfulness, self-compassion, psychological distress, and workplace stress. The study used a mixed-methods approach to effectively address the research questions. Using quantitative methods (1) changes in mindfulness, self-compassion, psychological distress, and workplace stress of the educators in the treatment group of the intervention were examined. Furthermore, the qualitative approach aimed to understand the impact of a mindfulness-based intervention on early childhood educators descriptively. Surveys from pre and post-intervention were analyzed along with open-ended responses and journal prompts. Results indicated: (a) mindfulness in educators increased from pre-intervention to post-intervention, (b) self-compassion was significantly higher from pre-intervention to post-intervention, (c) educators experienced significantly lower psychological distress at post-intervention compared to pre-intervention, and (d) positive impacts for some aspects of workplace stress. Qualitatively, educators perceived the intervention to be helpful in their personal and professional life in multiple ways. The findings added to the limited literature and show promising evidence of the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions in early childhood education settings

Cubetto: Coding in early mathematics.

In this digital generation, coding products have emerged as a new “hot item”, introducing programming skills to children through playful, hands-on tools. Effective uses of technology can enhance learning (Clements & Sarama, 2002), and incorporating mathematical discussions within children’s coding play, not only fosters children’s mathematical thinking, but these experiences make learning math fun (Gasteiger, 2015)