Jennings 2017

Source:   RESEARCH ARTICLE

APA Citation:

Jennings, P. A., Brown, J. L., Frank, J. L., Doyle, S., Oh, Y., Davis, R., Rasheed, D., DeWeese, A., DeMauro, A. A., Cham, H., & Greenberg, M. T. (2017). Impacts of the CARE for teachers program on teachers’ social and emotional competence and classroom interactions. Journal of Educational Psychology, advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000187.

Author bio:

Patricia Jennings – Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Special Education, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia

Joshua L. Brown – Department of Psychology, Fordham University

Jennifer Frank – Department of Education, Pennsylvania State University

Sebrina Doyle – Bennet Pierce Prevention Research Center, Pennsylvania State University

Regin Davis – Center for Public Research and Leadership, Columbia University

Damira Rasheed and Anna Weese – Department of Psychology, Fordham University

Anthony DeMauro – Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Special Education, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia

Heining Cham – Department of Psychology, Forham University

Mark Greenberg – Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Pennsylvania State University

Notes:

CLASS = Classroom Assessment Scoring System; a well-validated and commonly used observational measure of classroom interaction quality that assessed emotional support, classroom organization and instructional support. 2

CARE = Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education

There are numerous factors related to high levels of teacher stress and consequent burnout worldwide. These include managing student misbehavior, providing support to needy and/or unmotivated students, feeling that their workload is overwhelming, feeling a lack of control over decisions that affect them and their students, having little time to relax due to the need to take a deal of work home, and feeling the constant pressure to be accountable for student outcomes (Richards, 2012). Indeed, levels of stress among teachers have increased in the current era of high stakes testing (Dworkin & Tobe, 2014).

Mindful awareness practices may be particularly useful for helping teachers develop the skills they need to management demands of teaching … promote adaptive emotion regulation and coping which may lead to declines in stress, burnout and distress, and more energy and self-regulatory resources (e.g. more joy, more satisfaction, more wellbeing) that can then be invested in supportive teacher-student interactions that promote student learning 3

Program elements of emotion skills instruction, mindful awareness and stress reduction practices and caring and listening practices are hypothesized to promote increases in adaptive emotion regulation, teaching efficacy and mindfulness and reductions in psychological and physical distress as well as improvements in classroom interactions that promote learning (emotional support and classroom organization) 4

We hypothesized that teachers randomly assigned to receive CARE for Teachers would show statistically significant improvements in adaptive emotion regulation, teaching efficacy, and mindfulness and reductions in psychological distress and physical distress, compared with teachers randomly assigned to the waitlist condition 4

Little research has addressed ways to reduce teacher stress. The current study responded to this need by examining the efficacy of the CARE of Teachers program. The program was develop to promote … prosocial classroom model, proposing that when teachers lack certain social and emotional competences, their wellbeing erodes leading to a deterioration of the classroom climate and teacher stress. In contrast, teachers with high levels of social and emotional competencies are able to promote high quality classroom interactions that promote student learning 12

Program elements of emotion skills instruction, mindful awareness and stress reduction, caring and listening practices were hypothesized to result in increases in adaptive emotion regulation, teaching efficacy and mindfulness and reductions in psychological and physical distress, as well as improvements in classroom interactions that promote learning 12

Intervention teachers reported a substantial 14% improvement in adaptive emotion regulation compared with controls. 13

Intervention teachers provided higher levels of emotional support as observed by independent raters using CLASS 14

We found that teachers randomly assigned to the control group showed declines in emotional support from the beginning to the end of the school year … teachers trained in CARE for Teachers showing stable levels of classroom emotional support from pretest to posttest. The intervention showed similar protective effects for the positive climate dimension of emotional support, which reflects teachers’ warmth, closeness and respect for students 14