From Program to Practice: Unpacking the Impacts of Professional Development for Early Childhood Educators

Abstract

Despite increasing demands for high-quality early childhood education programs, programmatic quality across the United States’ broad early education sector remains inconsistent. To encourage early educators to implement high-quality practices, early education programs increasingly rely on professional development. However, those charged with developing such supports for early educators must often do so with limited resources and little insight into the factors underlying professional development impacts, as most research has focused on whether programs “work” or not on average. Each of the three papers in this dissertation moves beyond average impacts to explore how professional development works and for whom it works best. The first two papers unpack the impacts of a professional development approach thought to be particularly promising – coaching – and the third introduces a light-touch support for early educators rooted in many of the same behavioral science principles as coaching. In particular, Papers 1 and 2 leverage secondary data from a randomized control trial of a coaching program conducted with early educators primarily in Head Start and public school-based programs. Applying mixture modeling approaches, I find in Paper 1 that coaching had positive impacts on the beliefs and practices of some educators through two distinct processes: improvement and maintenance. In Paper 2, I provide evidence that the intervention’s individual coaching cycles induced immediate changes in educator practices. In Paper 3, I evaluate the efficacy of sending text messages about key practices to early educators in several types of group-based early education programs. I find the text messages altered educators’ language-related practices and were most impactful for educators who likely had few alternative professional development opportunities. Together, these papers offer practical insights to inform quality improvement efforts across the early education landscape. Specifically, this work suggests the use of tailored and targeted professional supports to meet the diverse needs of today’s early educators.