Classroom and Teacher Characteristics Predicting the Implementation of Banking Time with Preschoolers Who Display Disruptive Behaviors

Introduction: Positive teacher-child relationships expressed through warm, sensitive, and responsive teacher-child interactions are consistently linked with better academic and social-emotional child outcomes.  Children who display disruptive behaviors, however, are more likely to experience a teacher-child relationship characterized by negativity and conflict.  Banking Time is a dyadic intervention intended to improve a teacher’s relationship with a specific child.  Use of Banking Time has been linked with increases in teacher-child closeness, children’s frustration tolerance, and improvements in children’s disruptive behaviors.  Implementation of Banking Time has been shown to vary across teachers.   The effectiveness of early intervention and prevention programs depend upon the quality of their implementation.  The fields of early education and prevention science need additional research to address factors that are supports or barriers to implementing effective early childhood intervention and prevention programs.  In this paper, we will examine the relationship among baseline classroom and teacher characteristics and subsequent implementation of Banking Time-- both the intervention (Banking Time sessions) and the accompanying support system (individualized consultation). 

Methods: The sample included 65 preschool teachers who had been randomly assigned to implement Banking time within a large RCT. Predictors included multiple categories of classroom context, teacher demographics (personal and professional) and teacher beliefs (self-efficacy, authoritarian beliefs, and negative attributions about child disruptive behavior). Multiple indicators of implementation were assessed and included teacher report, consultant report and independent observations from which we created 3 composites (dosage, quality, and generalized practice).

Results and conclusion: The strength of the association among individual measures of implementation ranged from no association to moderate. The implementation composites were modestly associated with one another suggesting unique constructs of implementation. Aspects of classroom context (e.g. type of preschool program) were linked with dosage and quality. Aspects of teacher demographics related to all three implementation composites. Teacher beliefs predicted dosage and generalized practice.  Results suggest that the factors that predict the implementation of Banking Time vary as a function of the type of implementation being assessed.  Thus, these results imply that different teachers may need distinct types of scaffolding and support to successfully implement the various aspects of Banking Time. This type of individualization may be the key to the successful implementation of many SEL interventions.