Teachers' dispositional mindfulness and the quality of their relationships with children in Head Start classrooms
Introduction
The quality of relationships between teachers and children in early childhood programs is a key predictor of children's social-emotional competence and academic achievement (Denham et al., 2012, Raver et al., 2012). Teacher-child relationship quality may have a greater influence on child outcomes than commonly assessed teacher attributes, such as education level (Early et al., 2006, Early et al., 2007). To establish high-quality relationships with children, teachers must be knowledgeable about children's developmental levels, attuned to children's signals and needs, cognizant of cultural and familial context, and intentionally provide a comfortable, emotionally safe environment for children's learning – all in the context of offering rigorous assessment and instruction. As this is no easy task, early childhood teachers who are able to establish and maintain high-quality relationships with children, are themselves socially and emotionally competent adults (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). They have high levels of self- and social-awareness, regulate their behavior and emotions, and are intentional in their interactions with children.
In Head Start, a federally-funded comprehensive early childhood education program for low-income preschoolers (Head Start Services, n.d.), teachers often work with children whose families face stressful social circumstances, such as homelessness, single-parent households, and limited income, education, and literacy (Aikens et al., 2010, Bradley and Corwyn, 2002, Brooks-Gunn and Duncan, 1997). Children's stressors at home can contribute to poor self-regulation, emotional difficulties, and disruptive classroom behaviors that interfere with learning and place high demands on teachers (Blair, 2002, McClelland et al., 2007, Shonkoff et al., 2009, Webster-Stratton et al., 2008). High-quality teacher-child relationships are particularly important for children from these low-income families (Roorda, Koomen, Spilt, & Oort, 2011), but such relationships require teachers' to maintain high levels of emotion regulation and well-being.
The quality of teachers' relationships with children can be characterized on a continuum of closeness and conflict (Pianta, 1994). Close teacher-child relationships are characterized by warm, reciprocal interactions, with the child turning to the teacher for comfort in times of distress. On the other hand, relationships that are high in conflict are characterized by struggle, frequent anger, and frustrated interactions. High-quality teacher-child relationships (low in conflict and high in closeness) have been consistently associated with children's social-emotional competence and academic performance, both of which are key aspects of school readiness (Burchinal et al., 2002, Denham et al., 2012, Hamre and Pianta, 2001, Pianta and Stuhlman, 2004, Raver et al., 2012, Silver et al., 2005). In the context of Head Start, there is limited research on modifiable factors that may improve teacher-child relationships. For example, Banking Time, an intervention implemented among Head Start teachers to improve teacher-child relationships through one-on-one time with child-led play, has demonstrated positive impacts on teacher-child relationships (Driscoll & Pianta, 2010). However, due to the intensity of the intervention, it may be costly to implement on a large scale. Therefore, it is important to consider what other supports might assist Head Start teachers in developing positive relationships with children.
One promising approach to supporting Head Start teachers' relationships with children is to cultivate dispositional mindfulness among the teachers (Meiklejohn et al., 2012). Teachers who are more mindful in daily life may experience more positive relationships with the children in their classroom, but we are not aware of any studies that evaluate the association between dispositional mindfulness and the quality of teacher-child relationships in early childhood education. Much of the research investigating improved mindfulness skills among teachers has focused primarily on the impacts on teachers' subjective well-being and has not been conducted in early childhood education settings, such as Head Start (Benn et al., 2012, Flook et al., 2013, Gold et al., 2010, Jennings et al., 2017, Lomas et al., 2017, Roeser et al., 2012, Roeser et al., 2013).
There are several mechanisms by which dispositional mindfulness may improve the quality of teacher's relationship with preschool children. Mindfulness is defined by Kabat-Zinn (2003) as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment to moment” (p. 145). Individuals who are mindful tend to exhibit steady attention and notice and accept their thoughts, feelings and reactions to physical stimuli, including their own internal bodily sensations (Khanna & Greeson, 2013). The ability to be present and aware of one's thoughts and feelings, while suspending judgment, can improve self-regulation and reduce reactivity (Hölzel et al., 2011, Schussler et al., 2016, Shapiro et al., 2006).
Mindfulness has been linked to better relationship quality through improved interpersonal communication and the ability to be supportive to others in distress (Bihari and Mullan, 2014, Brown and Kasser, 2005), as in situations teachers frequently encounter when interacting with preschoolers. Participants in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MCBT), which is designed to improve the mindfulness skills of awareness and non-judgment, have reported less reactivity and a calmer demeanor toward negative external stimuli. In interpersonal relations, this results in a greater ability to avoid arguments with others and focus on conveying an understanding of others' perspectives and needs rather than trying to immediately remedy others' problems (Bihari & Mullan, 2014).
Mindfulness may help teachers to approach stressful classroom environments and children's challenging behavior with more awareness, acceptance, and emotion regulation. Being aware and accepting of emotions in self and others when appraising stressful situations may help teachers respond to these situations with calm intentionality, being proactive rather than reactive. Teachers who are more mindful may also have more empathy for children (Bihari and Mullan, 2014, Block-Lerner et al., 2007) and show more compassion toward them (Jennings and Greenberg, 2009, Jennings et al., 2011). Teachers with greater levels of dispositional mindfulness may also have greater relational capacities through improved emotion regulation, which may enable them to react in more constructive ways to disruptive classroom behaviors by understanding children's needs and perspectives, resulting in a less conflicted and more positive teacher-child relationships (Schussler et al., 2016).
Early childhood educators must themselves be well to establish warm, productive relationships with children and families. The strong association between poor mental health in adult caregivers and troubled interpersonal relationships with children has been established in the context of parenting (Campbell et al., 2004, Goodman et al., 2011, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 1999) and early childhood education (Gerber et al., 2007, Hamre and Pianta, 2004, Pakarinen et al., 2010, Paro et al., 2009). Early childhood teachers who report depressive symptoms are more likely to demonstrate less sensitivity and greater withdrawal in their interactions with children (Gerber et al., 2007, Hamre and Pianta, 2004, Jeon et al., 2014). Furthermore, teachers with depressive symptoms report higher conflict in their relationships with children (Hamre, Pianta, Downer, & Mashburn, 2008) and more children with problem behavior (Jeon et al., 2014).
Depressive symptoms are common among Head Start teachers, affecting as many as one in four (Whitaker, Becker, Herman, & Gooze, 2013), and have been associated with poor quality teacher-child relationships in Head Start classrooms (Whitaker, Dearth-Wesley, & Gooze, 2015). Low levels of psychological well-being among Head Start teachers could be the starting point in a series of causal links that may help explain why Head Start has experienced difficulty achieving its goal of increasing school readiness for children living in poverty (Mead, 2014). Teachers who experience poor mental health may find it challenging to engage in emotionally supportive interactions with the children they teach. The absence of emotionally supportive interactions may interfere with their ability to establish positive, warm, and responsive interpersonal relationships with children necessary to promote school readiness (Sandilos et al., 2015).
Despite the deleterious impact of teacher depressive symptoms on teacher-children relationships, dispositional mindfulness, which can be increased through mindfulness-based interventions, has been consistently shown in intervention studies to improve depressive symptoms (Goyal et al., 2014, Greeson et al., 2015, Hofmann et al., 2010). One mechanism by which mindfulness may improve depressive symptoms is by lowering levels of rumination, a process in which a person focuses only on distressing experiences together with their associated causes and consequences (Deyo et al., 2009, Hawley et al., 2014). Teachers who are more mindful may be able to more easily disengage from rumination (Greeson et al., 2015), and this may allow them to focus their attention on children's needs, regulate their own emotional responses, and build higher quality teacher-child relationships in their classroom.
Head Start teachers face many demands (Li-Grining et al., 2010, Zhai et al., 2011), and the context of a stressful workplace cannot be ignored in considering the potential impacts of dispositional mindfulness on the quality of teachers' relationships with children. Teachers are responsible for keeping children physically safe and emotionally secure, providing instruction to meet learning outcomes, and communicating effectively with families and coworkers. Because the environment in which teachers interact with children is also a predictor of the quality of teacher-children relationships (Pianta, 1999), it is important to consider teachers' experience of stress in the Head Start workplace. Perceived workplace stress has been shown to influence teacher interactions with young children in Head Start (Gerber et al., 2007). Higher levels of workplace stress in Head Start, defined as high demands, low support and low control (Karasek, 1979), are independently associated with teacher reports of more conflict in their relationships with children (Whitaker et al., 2015). Because early child educators, and Head Start teachers in particular, are likely to experience high levels of workplace stress, the association between teachers' dispositional mindfulness and teacher-children relationships may differ depending on the level of perceived workplace stress.
In summary, high-quality teacher-child relationships in Head Start may improve children's social-emotional competence and academic achievement. Improving teachers' dispositional mindfulness may support teachers in cultivating high-quality relationships with children, and may do so in part by reducing teachers' depressive symptoms. These associations may also differ across contexts with varying levels of perceived workplace stress. Fig. 1 illustrates our proposed conceptual framework for how children's social-emotional competence and academic achievement are related to the following variables: teachers' dispositional mindfulness, depressive symptoms, relationships with children, and workplace stress.
Using data from an online survey of 1001 classroom teachers in 37 Pennsylvania Head Start Programs, we examined the association between teachers' dispositional mindfulness and their relationships with children (conflict and closeness). We hypothesized that greater dispositional mindfulness would be associated with less conflict and more closeness in teachers' relationships with children. Because previous intervention research and theory support a likely causal relationship between greater dispositional mindfulness and reductions in depressive symptoms (Greeson et al., 2015, Hofmann et al., 2010) and between greater depressive symptoms and lower quality teacher-children relationships (Gerber et al., 2007, Hamre and Pianta, 2004, Hamre et al., 2008, Whitaker et al., 2015), we hypothesized that the association between greater dispositional mindfulness and higher quality teacher-children relationships will be mediated, in part, by lower levels of teachers' depressive symptoms. Past research in this sample (Whitaker et al., 2015), led us to further hypothesize that the association between dispositional mindfulness and teacher-children relationships may be moderated by workplace stress, whereby the association between dispositional mindfulness and teacher-children relationships would be stronger in settings where teachers perceive lower levels of workplace stress.
Section snippets
Overview
Data for this study were obtained from the Pennsylvania Head Start Staff Wellness Survey (SWS), a one-time web-based survey of all staff working in the state's Head Start and Early Head Start programs. This study focuses only on Head Start classroom teachers, but the survey also included home-based visitors and family service workers, as well as program directors and other managers. No data were collected from children or families. Details about the survey design and sample have been described
Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations
Levels of dispositional mindfulness, workplace stress, and teacher-children conflict had a statistically normal distribution, but the distribution of teacher-children closeness was skewed. Consistent with others studies (Gallagher, 2013, Pianta and Stuhlman, 2004), most teachers reported high levels of closeness with the children in their classroom. Levels of depressive symptoms also had a skewed distribution, with 6% of teachers reporting no depressive symptoms (CES-D = 0). All bivariate
Discussion
To our knowledge, this is the first study in early childhood education to demonstrate the association between teachers' dispositional mindfulness and the quality of their relationships with children. Among 1001 Head Start teachers, those with higher levels of dispositional mindfulness reported higher quality relationships with the children in their classrooms (less conflict and greater closeness). In other words, teachers who reported greater ease with attention, focusing, and acceptance in the
Acknowledgements
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Temple University had no role in the design and conduct of the study, in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data, or in the preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript. The authors have no potential conflicts of interest (financial interests, activities, and relationships) to disclose in relationship to this article. We thank all the Head Start and
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