Evaluation Findings from Year 2 of Georgia's CLASS-Related Professional Development Evaluation Project

FPG Child Development Institute. University of North Carolina, Publications Office, CB# 8185, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-8185. Tel: 919-966-0857; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://www.fpg.unc.edu/

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Bright from the Start: Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning

Faculty Development; Preschool Teachers; Models; Control Groups; Pretests Posttests; Teacher Attitudes; Preschool Education; Program Evaluation; Preschool Children; Teacher Student Relationship; Student Behavior; Coaching (Performance); Teacher Improvement; Classroom Techniques; Psychological Needs; Caring; Class Organization; Behavior Problems; Communities of Practice

During the 2015-16 academic year, Georgia's Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL) piloted three professional development models for Georgia's Pre-K teachers. All three models focused on the Instructional Support domain of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System™ (CLASS; Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008) and used resources developed by Teachstone. Pre- and post-intervention CLASS observations were collected for 94 participating teachers and revealed significant gains in average Instructional Support scores for teachers in all three models. Two of the three groups also evidenced gains in Emotional Support and Classroom Organization. The findings must be interpreted with caution because the sample was selected based on site director interest and convenience, thus we cannot know if these findings would generalize to other teachers. Further, we cannot know if these teachers would have demonstrated comparable growth with different professional development supports because the current study did not assign teachers to groups at random and did not include a control group. To gain more insight on that issue, the posttest CLASS scores of the teachers in these three professional development conditions were compared to those of a randomly selected group of teachers who served as the control group in another study of Georgia's PreK teachers. The findings were encouraging: all three groups of teachers had significantly higher posttest scores than the control group from the other study, after accounting for pretest scores, on Emotional Support and Classroom Organization. The MMCI w/Coaching group scored significantly higher than the control group from the other study on Instructional Support. Again, these findings must be interpreted with caution because the comparison group was part of a different study, during different academic years, and employing different data collectors. Teachers in all three conditions saw the professional development as useful and had had positive relationships with their coaches. Further, they generally felt that the training was in line with their personal goals and beliefs. Coaches generally reported that the teachers who improved the most were committed to change and open to feedback. Despite the cautions noted above, these models appear to be promising approaches to improving teacher-child interactions and warrant further development and research.

As Provided

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2018

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