Individual and Contextual Predictors of Pre-Kindergarten Teachers' Responsiveness to the Myteaching Partner Coaching Intervention

Introduction: Teacher quality has been found to be positively associated with child outcomes in early childhood; therefore, professional development efforts focus on improving teacher quality. MyTeachingPartner (MTP), a web-mediated coaching intervention, has been shown to improve teachers’ interactions with children and further analysis found that improvement in teachers’ interactions was mediated by their responsiveness to the intervention. The current study assessed how teacher characteristics, including demographics, beliefs, and psychological factors, as well as contextual characteristics related to teachers’ responsiveness to the MTP intervention. Further, we will test how responsiveness may mediate individual and contextual characteristics with teachers’ interactions.

Methods:  MyTeaching Partner was a randomized, controlled evaluation of a web-mediated coaching intervention designed to improve preschool teachers’ interactions with children (Pianta et al., 2008). The present study focuses on participants (n=205) who mostly taught in Head Start programs (40.0%) or public schools (29.3%).  The majority held either an Associate’s degree (29.5%) or a Bachelor’s degree (35.3%), with some holding a Master’s degree or higher (21.05%). On average, participants had about 10.6 years of experience teaching preschool (SD=8.04).  Teachers’ responsiveness included coach-reported engagement, coaching session attendance, home practice use of the web resources, and participant satisfaction.

Results:  We performed a set of multiple regression analyses to determine the unique ability of each independent variable to explain the responsiveness variables. Findings showed that related factors vary across the different indicators of responsiveness. Psychological factors, specifically anxiety and readiness to change, were found to relate to multiple indicators of responsiveness. We will test the full mediational model for the presentation.

Conclusions: The findings from this study can help facilitate the identification of teachers in need of intervention adaptation to increase overall responsiveness.