Preschool Teachers’ Use of Strategies to Support Social-Emotional Competence in Young Children

OpenAlex İngilizce

Healthy development of social-emotionalcompetence in early childhood years creates a strong foundation for futureacademic success and social-emotional well-being. The purpose of thisdescriptive study was to investigate preschool teachers’ use of strategies tosupport young children’s social-emotional competence. A total of 103 teachersand classrooms participated in the study. Descriptive findings of the studyindicated that preschool teachers implemented a few practices to promotesocial-emotional competence in young children in the absence of training andprofessional development support. Preschool teachers were observed to implementuniversal promotion practices more often than tertiary preventions practices.Preschool teachers’ overall use of strategies to enhance the social-emotionalcompetence of young children did not differ significantly across classroomtypes and levels and based on whether teachers received training on promotingsocial-emotional development and addressing challenging behaviors. Moreover,positive correlations between the level of preschool teachers’ use ofsocial-emotional teaching strategies, classroom quality scores, and the numberof adults in each classroom were observed. It was also observed that the correlation between preschool teachers’use of strategies and the number of children in each classroom was negative.Implications of the findings for future research and practice are discussed.