Browsing by Subject "Early childhood educators' well-being"

Objectives. Pedagogical planning is an essential process in early childhood education provision. It is also a space to embed child-centered pedagogy in practice. Connections between early childhood educators' well-being, children's well-being, and their participation in pedagogical planning have been found by prior research. Examining the dynamics between these phenomena sheds light on how important the well-being of all the early childhood education community members is in the process of education provision. This study aimed to look at the connection between children's psychosocial well-being, early childhood educators' subjective well-being, and the levels of child-centered pedagogical planning. The hypothesis predicted a positive association between the items mentioned above. Methods. The participants of the study were 43 early childhood educators and 165 children. The study was conducted in 15 groups within nine daycares across Finland. The data was collected through three questionnaires: SDQ (child's psychosocial well-being), WHO-5 (educators' subjective well-being), and Reunamo learning environment questionnaire (child-centered pedagogical planning). The statistical analyses were conducted with IBM SPSS Statistics. A quantitative item analysis was done to establish a child-centered pedagogical planning indicator. Three levels of this measure were identified (low, medium, and high). The analysis continued with performing a one-way analysis of variance between the levels of child-centered pedagogical planning indicator, the children's psychosocial well-being sum score, and the early childhood educator's subjective well-being sum score. Results and conclusions. The results highlighted that a high level of early childhood educators' well-being was positively connected with the high levels of child-centered pedagogical planning. However, regarding the children's psychosocial well-being and its association with the levels of child-centered pedagogical planning, a positive non-significant trend was observed. These findings raise awareness of the important connection between children's psychosocial well-being, early childhood educators' well-being and education provision. Additionally, they can be used in developing early childhood education practices.