Browsing by Subject "lapsen hyvinvointi päiväkodissa"

In recent years, leadership in early childhood education (ECE) has been studied especially from the perspective of pedagogical leadership. More and more, however, it is seen that pedagogical leadership should be shared in order to attain the goals of early education. The goal of early childhood education is to ensure the child's overall growth and well-being. The purpose of this study is to find out the possible connection between distributed leadership and child well-being in ECE environment. There are no earlier studies of the effectiveness of distributed leadership in day care center. Studies in the school context, however, show that distributed leadership has an impact on both school achievement and employee motivation. The study was a quantitative one, because there was statistical orientation project material available. The material was collected in the spring 2015 in 13 municipalities in southern Finland with child observation (N = 2 838) and with questionnaires to ECE staff and the directors of the day care centers (N = 150). The material of the study was analyzed by calculating correlations between summed variable of distributed leadership and child observations, child and learning environment estimates, which were made by the ECE staff and leadership estimates, which were made by the directors in day care centers. The analysis was made by the SPSS program. According to the study, distributed leadership was linked to the child well-being in ECE context in different ways and levels. Well-being was emerged as a quality of physical and social learning environment. In addition, the peer relationships of children worked out and their positive feelings were emphasized. The children also participated in the planning, implementation and evaluation of the activities. On the other hand, the interaction between the staff and the children was less pronounced if leadership was shared in the day care center. Pedagogical thinking and positive feelings about work were emphasized in staff´s and director´s responses. Thus, it can be concluded that leadership is meaningful both child and staff well-being in ECE context.