Understanding How Teachers' Classroom Practices Contribute to Young Children's Social-Emotional and Behavioral Outcomes

Research has consistently demonstrated that students’ social-emotional competence is important for positive academic, social, and mental health outcomes, as well as later life success (Calhoun et al., 2020; Deming et al., 2017; Domitrovich et al., 2017; Greenberg et al., 2017; Jones et al., 2015; Moffitt et al., 2011). Beyond academic teaching, the social nature of schools provides various opportunities for students to interact and engage with teachers and peers, inevitably shaping their social and emotional (SE) development. Given that students across preschool and elementary spend a large portion of their day in classrooms (Rowland, 2014), it is important to understand how different factors within the classroom environment can foster these skills. The Prosocial Classroom Model (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009) broadly seeks to explain how teachers’ SE well-being, along with their daily classroom practices (e.g., emotionally supportive interactions, effective implementation of SE practices) and student outcomes (e.g., SE and academic), produce change in one another through bidirectional associations. In order to thoroughly understand the mechanisms of change within these proposed interrelations, it is important to dismantle the whole and attend to the individual parts that contribute to an overall healthy, prosocial classroom. In this three-manuscript style dissertation, I particularly seek to understand how teachers’ daily, naturally occurring practices (e.g., language interactions, emotion-focused teaching practices), as well as other factors (e.g., teacher well-being) contribute to student outcomes (e.g., classroom engagement and SE development). Special attention is given to how these practices affect underrepresented and linguistically diverse youth (Taie & Goldring, 2020).