Supporting preschool teachers’ social-emotional competencies and “lenses” for challenging behavior in Virginia’s early childhood mental health consultation program

This paper introduces the Lenses for Children and Families tool, a practitioner-friendly framework to understand and promote teacher attributions for challenging behavior—or how teachers perceive behaviors. We first argue that teacher attributions for challenging behavior are an important social-emotional competency, and that to shift attributions, teachers draw on other social-emotional competencies including self-awareness, emotion regulation, and perspective taking. Then, we describe how the Lenses tool was used to help early childhood teachers notice and shift their attributions for children’s challenging behaviors as part of the Virginia Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation pilot program. We illustrate examples of teachers and consultants using the Lenses tool through short vignettes drawn from actual cases. We conclude by providing considerations for practitioners interested in addressing teachers’ attributions for challenging behavior as part of their work to support teachers’ social-emotional competencies.