Preschool Educators’ Readiness to Promote Children’s Emotional Competence

Abstract

The development of children's emotional competence (EC) throughout the preschool period is critical for supporting their future social competence, transition to school and long-term academic success. This paper reports on survey responses of 78 Australian preschool educators to the scale Preschool Educators' Readiness for Promoting Children's Emotional Competence modified from Bouillet, Ivanec & Miljević-Riđički (2014) and a short open response section. This scale sought the views of educators regarding aspects such as their competence, willingness to promote children's emotional competence and the influence of institutional environment and conditions, with response variations explored across different locations, centre type and also respondent age. While responses indicated strong agreement regarding ability to successfully conduct activities to promote emotional competence and also respondent's prioritization of activities for emotional competence before cognitive skills, there also were differences observed across respondents. For example, almost half responded that they were not adequately prepared by their undergraduate education to promote emotional competence. A small number of open responses were supplied (n=24). Given the small sample, these were used as additional evidence to support and explain the findings from the quantitative analysis. Overall findings highlight the need for strategies to support these educators. These include additional information and practical strategies within undergraduate training, the development of a shared language that defines these issues, ongoing professional development in their workplaces and a greater availability of practical strategies and programs to support them in delivering this important role.

Preschool teachers’ emotional intelligence and beliefs: Informing emotion socialization in the classroom

“…Many early childhood teachers are aware of the characteristics of children's social-emotional competence, as well as the importance of children's and their own emotions to learning and well-being [42,[45][46][47][48] . However, not all preschool teachers share this level of awareness, and there are marked differences in their enactment of adaptive emotion socialization [42,48] .…”

“…However, not all preschool teachers share this level of awareness, and there are marked differences in their enactment of adaptive emotion socialization [42,48] . Even when acknowledging the vital importance of preschoolers' emotional competence, teachers often also report feeling very unprepared to promote it, asserting the need for emotion-specific training [45,47,49] . Thus, evidence-based practices for both pre-and in-service professional development regarding teacher emotional competence and emotion socialization also are much needed [9,[50][51][52][53] .…”