Elsevier

Teaching and Teacher Education

Volume 37, January 2014, Pages 55-63
Teaching and Teacher Education

Head start and the intensification of teaching in early childhood education

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2013.09.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Study of the effects of teaching in early childhood settings on teacher well-being.

  • Accountability pressures are growing within ECE.

  • Work intensification is growing.

  • Teachers report finding increased difficulty enjoying their work.

Abstract

Head Start is the largest early childhood education program in the US. Echoing patterns emerging in ECE world-wide, Head Start has dramatically changed. Greater emphasis is now placed on kindergarten readiness, child and teacher assessment, professionalization, and increased competition for program funding. Drawing on a mixed methods research design, a case study was conducted that explores the nature and effects of these changes on teachers and the work of teaching within Head Start. Strong evidence of work intensification was found, a topic little explored within the wider ECE literature. In the light of this finding the authors question the model of professionalism that now dominates ECE reform.

Introduction

Like many other forms of work (Maume & Purcell, 2007), the work of teaching has intensified. “Teachers are spending more time at work, as well as more time at home working on teacher-related activities. [There is concern] that this trend has led to high levels of stress and a negative work-life balance for the teacher and ultimately a loss of teaching quality, which in turn creates a negative outcome for students and their learning” (Williamson & Myhill, 2008, p. 27). Reflecting the influence of neoliberalism in education (Tobin, 2012), a range of external sources of intensification have been identified. Generally, the work of teaching has become much more rapid paced and complex (Maume & Purcell, 2007) and work hours have increased (Stoddard & Kuhn, 2008). Growing complexity in teaching is evident in the aggressive politicalization of schooling resulting in proliferating and competing policies and practices and ever expanding expectations. In Japan, for example, where “new responsibilities of reform implementation have further intensified the workload of teachers” (Hooghart, 2006, p. 297), school reform has been seen as a means to “reinvigorate” the economy while simultaneously developing individuals with a “‘zest for living’” (p. 293). Greater emphasis on standardized testing, school inspections, documentation, teacher ranking, and team-work to meet mandates, supports a “new managerialism,” that for teachers “[means] less time for their students and teaching-related activities”(O’Brien & Down, 2002, pp, 111–123). All of this comes on top of the persistent and insistent press of everyday classroom teaching (see Williamson & Myhill, 2008, p. 28).

Internal sources also influence the experience of intensification (Ballet & Kelchtermans, 2008). Generally very hopeful people (Bullough & Hall-Kenyon, 2011) teachers are strongly committed to meeting children's diverse needs and take pleasure in many of the activities of teaching, especially those that produce evidence of student growth and development. To meet those needs, teachers often willingly work long hours, work harder, faster, and more intensely with few breaks even as they find themselves facing greater job insecurity, flat wages, and having less and less control over their work lives and rather little say over the goals toward which they are expected to work. Teacher identity comes into play: Concerned about children and wanting to “do a good job, [teachers] simply cannot refuse to implement [mandated] changes” (Ballet & Kelchtermans, 2008, p. 63).

With growing intensification, teachers struggle to balance home and work obligations (Ballet and Kelchtermans, 2008, Burchielli et al., 2006, Kelliher and Anderson, 2010, Palmer et al., 2012) and to manage feelings of frustration and growing stress. They have little time for reflection on their practice, and in their “extreme busyness” (Williamson & Myhill, 2008, p. 41), part of grappling with imposed innovations which pile up, rush about doing the best they can to do all that “must be done.” Reviewing the situation and looking ahead, a few researchers have questioned the sustainability of current trends. Considering the results of a large survey study of Australian teachers, Timms, Graham, and Cottrell (2007), for example, heard an “‘unmistakable’ warning bell,” that the teachers were “working with unsustainable and health threatening workloads” that promised to undermine educational quality (p. 582).

Historically, early childhood education has been the “most ‘open’ and least controlled classroom setting, a setting [typically] designed as child-centered and nurturing” (Madrid & Dunn-Kenney, 2010, p. 399). As Madrid and Dunn-Kenney (2010) argue, however, it appears times are changing. Many of the conditions that have encouraged the intensification of teaching in the upper grades also are appearing in early childhood education, including expanding responsibilities, dilation on student academic performance coupled with increased emphasis on student testing and teacher assessment, and competitive program funding. In addition, educational standards for early childhood teachers are rising and long established program purposes shifting. These changes have come quickly with little research to examine their impact on teachers. Two studies, one Australian (O'Brien & Down, 2002) another English (Osgood, 2006), note the concern.

Growing recognition of the importance of quality early childhood education to child well-being (Reynolds, Rolnick, Englund, & Temple, 2010) coupled with growing emphasis on ECE in much of the world as key to the development of human capital (Logan, Press, & Sumsion, 2012), suggest the need for greater attention to the nature of the work of early childhood teaching and of its effects on teachers. Accordingly, this study was designed to explore a set of questions that speak to what counts as quality ECE teaching and to teacher well-being understood as essential to sustaining quality teacher performance over time: 1) How is the work of teaching in Head Start organized (Head Start is the ECE program chosen for study)?; 2) What expectations dominate definitions of good teaching?; and, 3) How do teachers experience their work within Head Start? Is there evidence of intensification?

Section snippets

Background: why head start?

Head Start is by far the largest early childhood education program in the US. Head Start is a Federally funded but locally operated comprehensive early childhood program serving low-income children and their families. Children are provided medical and dental services, healthy meals and snacks, along with an educational program designed to further school readiness, including literacy, language, science, mathematics, and social-emotional development. Launched in 1965 to overcome the barriers of

The study

To address the questions posed for this study, data were needed that attended to the interaction of the teachers' work lives and private lives, a source of the problem of work/home “balance”, and on HS expectations and the organization of work and the institutional practices that support those expectations and thereby define the nature of the work of teaching. Accordingly, a mixed methods design for this case study was adopted. As Creswell (2003) states, a mixed methods approach to research

Organization structure

Typically assigned to two classes of 17 children, one taught in the morning, the other in the afternoon, teachers were supported by Family Advocates, individuals charged with working closely with the families, and three Mentor Coaches. In a few cases, the teachers served a dual appointment as both Lead Teacher and Family Advocate, although these teachers typically were only assigned to teach a single morning or afternoon session. Reflecting a corporate organization and hierarchy, various

Findings: specialists' views of good teaching

CLASS underpinned much of what the Specialists said in interview about good teaching, particularly those aspects of teaching related to classroom interaction. Analysis of the data revealed a second element of good teaching having to do with the teachers' institutional or programmatic support of Head Start. It was this area, especially, that gave rise to the concern with the intensification of the work of teaching and the effects of intensification on the quality of child/teacher interaction.

Federal reviews and paperwork

Across the 122 surveys, a large majority of Lead and Assistant Teachers pointed toward federal regulations as sources of increased stress and of persistent time management problems. For Specialists and teachers alike federal reviews and preparing for reviews (each year there was an internal program review) were dreaded but understood to be an inevitable part of life within Head Start.

Comments made by the teachers in interview flesh out the picture. For the Specialists, keeping up with paperwork

Professionalism

The Specialists' conceptions of best teaching are embedded in and supported by the established structure of work within Head Start and represent a professional ideal, a normalized but not unproblematic social practice. Considering parallel trends in England, Osgood (2006) argued that a “neo-liberal discourse [about professionalism] places an emphasis upon being rational above an ethic of care” (p. 8). Facing “increased and increasing demands…to demonstrate (measurable) competence [leads to]

Conclusion: rethinking policy

Federal policies loom over all that is done in Head Start, but, as noted, intensification is not merely a phenomenon of early childhood education in the US. Describing recent developments in the UK, Goepel (2012) noted the persistence of “managerial professionalism” as a response to tightening government policies and increasingly aggressive accountability practices, a sort of “tick-box professionalism where teachers demonstrate the expected behaviors but out of compliance and in an environment

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