Exploring Early Childhood Educators and Teachers’ Beliefs and Operationalization of Self-Regulation in Ontario Kindergarten Classrooms

Self-regulation skills lay the foundation for long-term social, emotional, behavioural, and educational well-being (Zelazo et al., 2016) and develop rapidly between the ages of 3-7 years through direct teaching practices (Dignath et al., 2016). Despite the critical importance of supporting self-regulation capabilities, research shows that few teachers explicitly teach self-regulation skills (Spruce & Bol., 2015) due to a lack of conceptual clarity in empirical and practical literature (Jones et al., 2016). The Kindergarten Program (2016) in Ontario provides an opportunity to capture the voices of early years educators on this topic because of its unique teaching team. Therefore, the purpose of this exploratory study is threefold: 1) to examine the ways early years educators define self-regulation, 2) to understand the strategies and practices that early years educators use to foster self-regulation development, and 3) to articulate the ways educator training influences teacher beliefs and self-regulation practices in kindergarten. This study uses a mixed-methods approach to capture the voices from Ontario’s Full Day Kindergarten teaching team. Using an adapted version of the Self-Regulated Learning Teacher Belief Scale (Lombart et al., 2009), early childhood educators (ECEs) and OCT certified teachers provided insight into early years educators beliefs, knowledge, and operationalization of self-regulation. Results from this study demonstrate that both professions hold high beliefs towards the promotion of self-regulation and children’s capabilities to self-regulate. However, ECEs and teachers have different understandings of self-regulation as well as use different strategies and practices to foster self-regulation. For example, this study finds ECEs are more prepared for teaching self-regulation because their training has specifically focused on and highlighted this area of child development, while the majority of teachers did not learn about self-regulation in their professional training. With this finding, we can now look at ways to integrate this information into the training of teachers and potentially reform parts of the teacher training program. Overall, the findings build on existing self-regulation literature and provide a new contribution by including the perspectives of early years educators.

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