Although urban teachers are at-risk of experiencing significant work-related stress, urban teacher stress has been neglected in the research literature to date. Through semi-structured interviews conducted with a sample of K-4 urban teachers (N = 14) from three highpoverty schools in a large, Midwestern city, we examined teachers' perceptions regarding sources and impact of stress and the resources needed to address identified stressors. Results from consensual qualitative research (CQR; Hill et al. in Couns Psychol, 25:517-572, 1997; Hill et al. in Consensual qualitative research: an update, 2005) suggest that at least one-half of the cases identified lack of resources, excessive workload, school-level disorganization, managing behavior problems, and accountability policies as significant sources of stress. The majority of teachers reported that occupational stress significantly impacted their personal relationships and physical health, and teachers identified human and material resources as most important to reducing work-related stress. Implications for organizationally based interventions and school policies to address urban teacher stress are discussed.

Schools remain among the most frequent providers of children's mental health services, particularly in low-income urban settings. Several decades of research have focused on training teachers to implement evidence-based interventions for minimizing disruptive behavior. Studies consistently demonstrate robust improvements in student behavior and learning; however, the impact on teachers' work-related stress or satisfaction is not well understood. Six urban, high-poverty elementary schools were randomly assigned to a school mental health services model (Links to Learning; L2L) for referred, disruptive students or to services and professional development as usual (SAU). Teachers (n = 71, K-4 general education teachers) in L2L schools participated in professional development and consultation in two universal and two targeted interventions to reduce disruptive behaviors and promote learning. Teachers (n = 65) in SAU schools participated in professional development as usual. Multiple regression models examined teacher reports of individual-level self-efficacy, classroom-level student functioning, and school-level organizational health as predictors of stress and satisfaction. Findings revealed no significant difference between conditions on teacher work-related stress or satisfaction. Organizational health was the strongest predictor of stress and satisfaction. Training on and implementation of evidence-based classroom interventions did not appear to significantly impact teachers' work-related stress or satisfaction. Instead, findings point to organizational climate and teacher connectedness as potential levers for change, supporting prior work on teacher stress and satisfaction in schools. The significance of targeting organizational factors may be particularly significant in urban school districts.

Dissemination and implementation science (DI) has evolved as a major research model for children’s mental health in response to a longstanding call to integrate science and practice and bridge the elusive research to practice gap. However, to address the complex and urgent needs of the most vulnerable children and families, future directions for DI require a new alignment of ecological theory and public health to provide effective, sustainable, and accessible mental health services. We present core principles of ecological theory to emphasize how contextual factors impact behavior and allow for the reciprocal impact individuals have on the settings they occupy, and an alignment of these principles with a public health model to ensure that services span the prevention to intervention continuum. We provide exemplars from our ongoing work in urban schools, and a new direction for research to address the mental health needs of immigrant Latino families. Through these examples we illustrate how DI can expand its reach by embedding within natural settings to build on local capacity and indigenous resources, incorporating the local knowledge necessary to more substantively address long-standing mental health disparities. This paradigm shift for DI, away from an over-emphasis on promoting program adoption, calls for fitting interventions within settings that matter most to children’s healthy development, and utilizing and strengthening available community resources. In this way, we can meet the challenge of addressing our nation’s mental health burden by supporting the needs and values of families and communities within their own unique social ecologies.

Because the feedback children and adolescents receive is important to their development, 2 experimental studies were designed to examine children's (M = 12 years) and adolescents' (M = 17 years) active selection of the quality of feedback they wish to receive. In both studies evidence emerged that participants' self-perceptions influence their feedback seeking. Participants with positive self-perceptions sought more positive feedback than participants with negative self-perceptions and sought more positive feedback than expected by chance. Participants with negative self-perceptions lacked this tendency to seek positive feedback and sometimes sought less positive feedback than expected by chance. As expected, depression and attachment-related measures were also associated with participants' feedback seeking. Contributions of feedback-seeking patterns to stability and change in children's and adolescents' development are discussed.