Teacher Self-Efficacy, Stress, and Stress Coping Strategies in Early Childhood Educators

Abstract

The University of Washington’s Early Childhood Education (ECE) teacher well-being hybrid and online courses for both pre-service and in-service teachers uses stress coping strategies to foster resilience, self- value, and confidence in ECE teachers. The present study employed a mixed-method research approach to investigate three questions pertaining the Fall 2022 iteration of this course as follows: 1) What were the changes, if any, in participants’ perceived stress, self-efficacy, and stress coping strategies from the beginning to the end of the course? 2) Which predictors, including pretest scores, class type (online and hybrid class modalities), and years of experience, were uniquely associated with the changes in participants’ perceived stress, self-efficacy, and stress coping strategies from this course? 3) In what ways, if any, did participants perceive stress-coping strategies learned during the course as effective or beneficial, based on their experience implementing the strategies? To answer these questions, I analyzed data from N = 21 participants enrolled in the Fall 2022 ECE teacher well-being course. Overall, the results found that 1) there were statistically significant improvements in teachers’ self-efficacy in their capacity to engage students due to participants’ value of commitment and maintaining cognitive functioning when managing children’s behavior; 2) the increased use of the emotional-focused coping strategy may be due to the benefits experienced when using that particular strategy; 3) participants who had less teaching experience were more likely to use emotional-focused coping because they are more likely to seek emotional support and build relationship when coping stress; 4) participants, on average, reported a high intention of implementing stress coping strategies from the course in the future due to effectively resolving stress with minimal effort in the implementing the coping strategies.