Early Childhood Inservice and Preservice Teachers’ Perceived Levels of Preparedness to Handle Stress in their Students

Abstract

This article reports a study that investigated preservice and inservice early childhood teachers' perceived levels of preparedness to handle stress in early childhood and elementary education students. A survey that included vignettes was used to collect data. Data were analyzed both qualitatively and statistically, using one-way ANOVA, t-test, and descriptive statistics. Results showed that, on average, preservice and inservice teachers perceived themselves as moderately prepared to handle stress in their students. There were no statistically significant differences between preservice and inservice teachers perceived levels of preparedness to handle stress. Preservice and inservice teachers felt most prepared to deal with school-related stress and least prepared to deal with society-related stress in their students (statistical significance at .001 level). Participants had two major recommendations: first, preservice and inservice teacher training should include more material on stressors during the early childhood years, and second, that supervised field experiences should do more to prepare future teachers to deal with stress in young children. The study concludes that teacher preparation programs need to prepare their preservice teachers more thoroughly to deal with stress in their students. Suggestions from participants on how to do this are also included.

Networking and professional development among teachers of Early Childhood Education

“…The findings reported here regarding the professional enrichment of teachers through contributions made by university students reinforce the findings of other research, for example, by Stipek and Byler (1997), Carlson and McKennan (2000), Onchwari (2010), Gialamas and Nikolopoulou (2010), Jensen and Shepston (1997), and Cohan and Honigsfeld (2011), among others.…”

Mindfulness‐based SEL programming to increase preservice teachers’ mindfulness and emotional competence

“…However, training for teachers in this area is not keeping pace with the research (Klassen, Perry, & Frenzel, ). Approximately two‐thirds of teachers perceive themselves as being moderately or poorly prepared for understanding and regulating emotions at work (Onchwari, ). Researchers have found that there are minimal opportunities for training once students leave the university classroom (Foster, Johnson‐Shelton, & Taylor, ), which suggests that preservice training in this area is critical (Palomera et al., ).…”

Identity development among pre-service teacher candidates

“…The influx of dissatisfied teachers has prompted education researchers to examine the teacher attrition phenomenon extensively (e.g. Mahan, 2010;McCann & Johannessen, 2004;Onchwari, 2009). Hong (2010) surmised that "current studies have focused on demographic characteristics of the individual teachers such as gender, age, ethnicity, or marital status, or school characteristics such as average class size, expenditure, poverty enrollment, students demographics and minority enrollment" (pp.…”