Conference Agenda

Topic

This study examines the role of preschool teachers’ self-efficacy in the context of early childhood education and investigates how continuous professional development contributes to strengthening teachers’ perceived capacity to manage classroom situations, engage children, and adapt instructional strategies. The topic is anchored in recent debates on the quality of early childhood education in Romania and responds to the need to understand how professional standards and training experiences shape educators’ confidence in practice.

Research Question

The central research question guiding the study is:
To what extent does participation in a structured professional development programme lead to an increase in preschool teachers’ perceived self-efficacy compared to colleagues who continue their routine activity without targeted intervention?

Related sub-questions examine:

• whether both groups begin from comparable levels of self-efficacy (pre-test);

• whether post-intervention differences are observable both in total scores and across sub-dimensions of efficacy;

• and whether demographic or professional factors (age, rank, class size, educational background) contribute to outcomes beyond the effect of the intervention.

Objective

The main objective of the study is to evaluate the impact of a quasi-experimental training intervention on teachers’ self-efficacy, measured before and after participation. Specifically, the aim is to determine whether teachers in the experimental group report higher levels of perceived efficacy in:

1. child engagement,

2. classroom management, and

3. instructional adaptation,
   compared with a control group that did not receive the intervention.

Secondary objectives include analysing changes in the distribution of self-efficacy levels (continuous and ordinal scores) and testing whether initial competencies and contextual variables moderate the training effect.

Theoretical Framework

This study is positioned at the intersection of social-cognitive theory and contemporary perspectives on early childhood professional practice. Bandura’s model conceptualises self-efficacy as a belief system shaped by mastery experiences, social modelling, verbal feedback, and affective states, all of which regulate professional engagement and persistence (Bandura, 1997). In early childhood settings, these mechanisms are shaped by daily pedagogical routines, the emotional climate of the classroom, and educators’ opportunities to experiment with new approaches. The present research draws on this premise by designing a training programme that intentionally integrates guided practice, feedback cycles, and reflective journaling as potential “sources of efficacy information” for participants.

Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy’s teacher efficacy model further structures the framework along three instructional domains—engagement, classroom management, and instructional adaptation—areas that align closely with Romanian professional standards for early childhood education introduced in 2024. By mapping the subscales of the measurement instrument to these standards, the study assumes that self-efficacy is not merely a psychological construct but a practice-oriented indicator of professional functioning, embedded in policy expectations and organisational culture. This conceptual anchoring supports the argument that efficacy growth can be interpreted as both an individual cognitive shift and a response to systemic professional demands.

Finally, the quasi-experimental design operationalises the framework by testing whether increases in self-efficacy can be observed when teachers are exposed to structured learning conditions that approximate real pedagogical work rather than abstract theory. In this sense, the framework assumes a bidirectional relationship: the intervention is expected to enhance efficacy beliefs, and, reciprocally, strengthened efficacy should support the transfer of new practices to classroom contexts. This positioning situates the study within ongoing international debates about how professional development can function not only as skill acquisition, but as a mechanism for reshaping teachers’ interpretive frameworks, decision-making routines, and professional identity.

This is a summary of two studies that examines the effects of pedagogical intervention on the emotional availability (EA) of early childhood professionals’ (ECPs’) and their ability to consider the different temperamental characteristics of children in early childhood education and care (ECEC) group interactions. The study takes a professionally developmental approach, and the long-term training and video-based feedback are used to strengthen the emotional availability of professionals in group interactions. The study uses a before-and-after research design, which can be used to identify changes over time in the interaction of professionals in the intervention group compared to the control group.

The effects of the intervention on interaction between early childhood professionals and children in ECEC are discussed in this summary based on two previously published studies (Harkoma et al., 2021; Harkoma et al., 2022). This summary provides comprehensive answers to the following two research questions: 1) What effects does pedagogical intervention have on the emotional availability of professionals in group interactions? and 2) What effects does pedagogical intervention have on professionals’ ability to be emotionally available in a group to children with different temperament characteristics?

This is Europe's first intervention study to apply the theoretical framework of Emotional Availability (EA) in ECEC. Similar intervention study has been implemented previously in United States with promising results (Biringen et al., 2012). The framework of Emotional Availability approaches interaction between adult and children from the perspective of attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969). Emotional availability refers to the reciprocity of interaction, and adult's ability to perceive children's emotional signals and respond to them appropriately (Biringen et al., 2014; Emde, 2000). The study also examined the connection between the quality of interaction and children’s temperament, an area in which very little previous research exists in ECEC (De Schipper et al., 2008; Rudasill & Rimm-Kaufman, 2009). Temperament is defined using Rothbart's psychobiological approach, in which temperament is “constitutionally based individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation, influenced over time by genes, maturation and experience” (Rothbart, 2012, p. 9; see also Rothbart & Derryberry, 1981).

The early childhood professionals in the intervention group received theoretical training that included, for example, knowledge on attachment relationships, sensitive interaction and considering children’s individual characteristics in group interactions. The training lasted three months, and it included five 90-minute sessions with the supervisor familiar with the subject. During the training, professionals also received video-based feedback on their interactions with the group of children. It was important that the feedback given to the professionals focused on their individual and professional strengths in interaction. The aim of the feedback was to reinforce their experiences of success with the group of children. The training was designed to support individual and team reflection, as it gave professionals the opportunity to participate in discussions and express their views on children and their interactions with them. Reflection on interaction continued after the training with a diary that was written regularly and returned to the researchers by the end of the study. The diaries were used to assess intervention fidelity of professionals.

Teacher professional development activities are essential for teacher continious learning but to be targeted and successful they need to be context-embedded (Kyureghyan, 2023). This case study aims to explore a ‘Journal club’ as a professional development approach for novice ECE teachers. Journal clubs are informal and structured gathering to discuss research and practice literature to keep practitioners up to date, providing an opportunity to discuss how research is relevant to their practice and develop critical thinking skils (Linzer, 1987; Sidorov, 1995). Discussions are led by a facilitator who leads the group through thinking and reflection. Initially coming from medical field, the use of journal cubs in education settings has increased in recent years as research engagement has become more widespread in professional development and considered to be central in enhancing teachers’ professional learning and pedagogical practice (Admiraal et al., 2017; Elder and Crain-Dorough, 2021, Kowalczuk-Walędziak and Ion, 2024).

This study examines the implementation of a journal club model for ECE teachers in a newly opened pre-school in Armenia to engage them in continious professional learning. The research question of this study was:

· How does the journal club function as a form of professional development for novice ECE teachers?

An interpretive qualitative case study (Yin, 2018) was employed drawing on social constructivist perspectives (Cochran-Smith, & Lytle, 1999) to examine the implementation and function of a journal club as a professional development approach for novice ECE teachers.

Primary data consist of my field notes taken during and after each discussion meeting and semi-structured interviews with participating teachers. Overall, 15 topics were discussed as part of Journal club meetings. These interactions not only prompted critical reflection on pedagogical practice but also surfaced context-specific issues that teachers were encountering in their work. The journal club thus functioned both as CPD and as a form of mentoring, with sustained peer dialogue around practical and theoretical concepts.

Topic and research questions

Collaboration is an important component of teacher professional development (Lipscombe et al. 2020), and literature highlights that teachers benefit from collaboration in professional learning communities. Teacher professional learning needs to be close to practice (Wermke 2010), and in the work presented in this proposal we explore the ways in which teachers and researchers collaborated to create a professional learning module (PLM) that is both collaborative and also aligned with teachers’ needs. This proposal represents one study from a project which had the goal of developing PLMs that are responsive to teachers’ needs and that builds from their experiences.

This proposal examines the coplanning process undertaken by a team of primary teachers and university researchers as they worked to codesign a PLM within early childhood science education in [European country]. This PLM targets early childhood teachers and uses the narrative of the Three Little Pigs story as a central theme for its scientific activities and investigations. Coplanning with teachers provides a valuable space for sharing ideas, reflecting on past experiences, and developing mutual understandings of practice (Scantlebury et al. 2008). Within our work we sought to create a dialogic space for coplanning through the codesign of a PLM in a team consisting of in-service teachers and researchers.

In this process, we noted that teachers often spoke from their perspectives of their students’ engagement with the investigations. From this initial observation, an analytic focus emerged from the coplanning process on the ways in which a diversity of children’s experiences and interests was represented in the teachers’ dialogue, how these mediated the context of the teacher-researcher coplanning sessions, and how these unfolded through the dialogue. The questions that guided our analysis are: 1. How do teachers draw on their perspectives of their students’ engagement within the coplanning sessions? 2. What structures support this sharing process? To address these questions, we consider the diverse ways in which children’s experiences are represented in teachers’ interactions during coplanning sessions for the PLM.

Guiding theoretical framework

Our work strives towards creating structures that nurture collaboration through a codesign process built on a foundation of coplanning, coteaching, and cogenerative dialogue (Author et al. 2025).

Coteaching is guided by the notion of learning “at the elbow” of another, as coteachers learn from and with each other through teaching together (Roth and Tobin 2002). Coteaching brings individuals together and offers a space to coplan an educational activity, and then conduct it together, learning from each other, broadening pedagogical content knowledge, and challenging an idea of a lone teacher being responsible for quality education (Tobin and Roth 2006). Successful coteaching is a result of successful coplanning, as it is a process during which a shared responsibility for teaching and learning emerges.

Coplanning and coteaching are grounded in cogenerative dialogue to incorporate multiple voices, experiences and different perspectives for establishing a plan of working towards shared objectives (Tobin 2006, Author 2011) and to support coteachers in reflexively considering their shared practice (Author and colleague 2011).

In the context of our work, we coplan and then coteach PLMs, with the objective of bringing together different perspectives and experiences of teachers and researchers. Teachers come together with researchers in designing and implementing new educational activities that are built upon people’s expertise through cogenerative dialogue. Thus, the coplanning sessions are intended as spaces of 1. Open sharing of each others’ perspectives and experiences, 2. Designing a new educational structure, 3. Establishing shared responsibility for the outcomes.