Preschool Teachers’ Use of Strategies to Support Social-Emotional Competence in Young Children

Healthy development of social-emotional competence in early childhood years cre-ates a strong foundation for future academic success and social-emotional well-being. The purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate preschool teachers’ use of strategies to support young children’s social-emotional competence. A total of 103 teachers and classrooms participated in the study. Descriptive findings of the study indicated that preschool teachers implemented a few practices to pro-mote social-emotional competence in young children in the absence of training and professional development support. Preschool teachers were observed to implement universal promotion practices more often than tertiary preventions practices. Pre-school teachers’ overall use of strategies to enhance the social-emotional compe-tence of young children did not differ significantly across classroom types and lev-els and based on whether teachers received training on promoting social-emotional development and addressing challenging behaviors. While there was a positive cor-relation between the level of preschool teachers’ use of social-emotional teaching strategies and the number of adults in the classrooms, a negative correlation was observed between preschool teachers’ use of strategies and the number of children in the classrooms. Implications of the findings for future research and practice are discussed.