Promoting Partnerships with Parents in Preschool Programs: Does the Number of Classroom Sessions a Day Matter?

Abstract

Positive parent-teacher relationships are associated with positive child outcomes (Minke, 2010).  Teachers’ work contexts, such as the number of children/families each teacher serves each day/week and a teacher’s self-efficacy may influence teachers’ abilities to build those relationships.  Participants in this pilot study included families of children enrolled in publicly- funded preschool programs and their teachers.  To assess their perceptions of self-efficacy regarding parent-teacher relationships, preschool teachers completed the Teacher Efficacy for Promoting Partnerships Scale (Moen, Sheridan, & White, 2016).  Findings suggest that preschool programs using a single all-day session model with fewer children and families assigned per teacher, may permit teachers to more quickly establish partnerships with parents, or at least establish a confidence in working with parents sooner in the relationship than teachers assigned to teach to double (two half-day) sessions each day.