Influence of Head Start Lead Teacher Profiles on the Relation between Coaching and Intervention Fidelity

Abstract

Promoting social-emotional (S-E) competence among young children from low-income backgrounds (LIB) remains a national imperative, given that early S-E competence predicts later outcomes and that children from LIB are less likely to enter kindergarten with adequate S-E skills. From an ecological perspective, high-quality early childhood education (ECE) experiences can offer differential benefit to children from LIB, so it is worthwhile to devote efforts to improve ECE quality. Coaching-centered interventions that provide ECE teachers with ongoing support for implementation of new strategies, like the Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management Program (IY TCM), predict positive changes in teacher behavior, classroom climate, and S-E competence. Additionally, teachers’ professional background, psychological load, perceptions, and classroom process quality can impact coaching and fidelity outcomes. Using data from the Head Start CARES national demonstration, this dissertation explored the degree to which Head Start lead teachers’ responses on indicators could be organized into profiles and, subsequently, the degree to which profile membership moderated the relation between coaching dosage and average IY TCM intervention fidelity. Latent profile analysis results supported three profiles, best distinguished by low, moderate, and high levels of initial classroom process quality. Despite a lack of relationship between coaching dosage and average fidelity, logistic regression identified main effects of profile membership, such that lead teachers in Profiles 1 and 2 were less likely than teachers in Profile 3 to be in the high mean fidelity group when provided with the average coaching dosage. Results offer implications about collections of teacher-level factors that impact fidelity, future directions for exploring CARES data, and Head Start technical assistance.