Improving the Quality of Parent-Teacher Interactions in an Early Childhood Classroom

Abstract

Quality parent-teacher interactions promote positive relationships and valuable sharing of information (e.g., Endsley and Minish 1991;Ingvarsson and Hanley 2006), outcomes that affect parent satisfaction (Winkelstein 1981) and may also contribute to child development. Supportive relationships between families and educators facilitate child learning and decrease problem behavior (e.g., Fiese et al. 2006). Identifying ways to build positive relationships by promoting quality parent-teacher interactions in early childhood settings is a worthwhile endeavor. Unfortunately, these interactions occur infrequently during natural opportunities, such as morning drop-off in child care centers (Perlman and Fletcher 2012). To address this issue, we taught teachers to initiate quality interactions with parents by using a 12-step task analysis. We developed training procedures that would be easy to implement in a busy child care setting and would be acceptable to teachers who participated in the training.Teachers were undergraduate students who worked in an early childhood classroom as part of a practicum course. We developed a parent-teacher interaction task analysis (Table 1) based on supervisory expectations, licensing requirements, and published research (e.g., Perlman and Fletcher 2012). We measured the accuracy with which teachers implemented the task analysis and asked teachers to complete a questionnaire so that we could assess the acceptability of the training procedures.An organizational-level functional assessment revealed that teachers (1) were unable to describe correctly the behaviors comprising a parent-teacher interaction, and (2) lacked the skills to accurately implement the task analysis (criterion was set to 80 % accuracy across three consecutive observations). After obtaining university approval to conduct the study, we used a concurrent multiple baseline design across shifts to evaluate the effects of training on teacher accuracy. Our analysis consisted of two to four phases depending on teacher performance: (1) baseline, (2) task clarification, (3) videobased training, and (4) feedback.During baseline, teachers experienced typical training offered by the child development center (e.g., reading a manual, orientation, feedback from their supervisor on a variety of behaviors). Teacher accuracy for the morning (M=66.5 %) and afternoon (M=58.8 %) shifts was below criterion levels ( Fig. 1). Task clarification consisting of a brief review of a written task analysis was ineffective for teachers working the afternoon shift (M=60.9 %); thus, we did not introduce this intervention for the morning shift. A video-based training package consisting of a 5-min, 4-s video with models, guided notes, and a 5-item quiz increased teacher accuracy for both shifts. The morning shift reached mastery criterion quickly (M=87 %). Although teachers in the afternoon shift demonstrated increases in accuracy (M=76.5 %), they achieved criterion performance only when performance feedback was provided (M=89.2 %). Feedback consisted of a b...

The use of the Performance Diagnostic Checklist-Human Services in development of interventions to increase fidelity

“…In the absence of consistent implementation of skill development programs, skills may not develop functionally or fluently (Dogan et al 2017). Collaterally, staff-caregiver relationships are critical for the development and generalization of skills across settings, as research has shown that positive interactions and relationships can facilitate skill development, generalization of learned skills, and reduce problematic behavior (Berc et al 2014). If a skill can only occur within a certain context or under the specific conditions which it was trained, the individual's functional repertoire is limited.…”