The effectiveness of individual coaching respectively mentoring sessions in the language support skills of teachers in early childhood in Germany

Author(s):

Angie Lämmerhirt(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

11. Educational Improvement and Quality Assurance

Format:

Paper

Session Information

11 SES 08 A, Educational Improvement: National Level (Part 1)

Paper Session to be continued in 11 SES 09 A

Time:

2015-09-10

09:00-10:30

Room:

102.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Lynne Grant-McMahon

Contribution

Quality of child care affects the development of children in important ways. According to Tietze et al. (1998, p. 389) developmental differences of up to one year can be explained by the quality of child care. The educational process quality deserves special attention insofar as it can be seen as transmitter of the structure and orientation quality of child care which influences the development of children directly (Tietze et al., 1998, p. 225). Against this background, the quality of the teacher-child interaction is particularly important. It is an important determinant for the development of children’s academic achievement and social-emotional competence (Mashburn 2008, Siraj-Blatchford 2002). Mashburn (2008) shows that there is an increase in linguistic and academic skills in children if educators support them systematically in their learning process.
Several national studies show that the average interaction quality of kindergartens in Germany is below the quality level of “good”. According to Fried (2011) teachers use linguistic strategies that do not ensure the best possible conditions for child development.

A large-scale national study on the quality of day care centers also shows that the quality of education in child care regarding emergent mathematics, literacy and science, are insufficient in more than 50 percent (Tietze et al., 2012), a further examination by Tietze, Rossbach and Grenner (2005) revealed similar findings. König (2009) also recognized unfavorable results in her videobased study regarding the verbal input by teachers in everyday practice. It proves that daily kindergarten routine is rarely characterized by a stimulating exchange between teacher and child (König 2009). National and international studies confirm this pattern of findings (Siraj-Blatchford & Manni, 2008, Kuger & Kluczniok 2008; Smidt, 2012).

Therefore, the goal of "QuafkoS - qualification for a competent language support" is to improve the quality of interaction in child care centers by increasing the competence of language support teachers. The study investigates whether training in combination with individual coaching or mentoring sessions results in improvements in teachers output and has a positive effect on the teacher-child interaction. Here, the term of language support competence defined by Fried and Briedigkeit (2008) is central. They define "Language support competence" as ability of teachers to handling the support children in their early language education and to cope possible problems of childrens language development.

The basis for the change in the interaction behavior of teachers are coaching and mentoring sessions, respectively. This includes a reflective conversation of a videotaped storybook transfer with the method of "dialogical storybook reading" as well as the development of a separate project to implement one of the subjects for training in the educational practice.

The method of "dialogic storybook reading" was chosen because international studies show that it leads to an improvement of language competencies within a few weeks and because it can easily be recognized by teachers (Zevenbergen & Whitehurst, 2008, Arnold et al., 1994). The "dialogic storybook reading“ is also a favorable choice because educators stimulate the participation of children by question and feedback techniques and enhance their own language support competence.

The fundamental questions of the present study are:
1. Do interaction structures of dialogic reading of shared picture books improve over the measurement period? With regard to this question, the following hypotheses can be derived:

The more coaching respectively mentoring sessions take place…

the more teachers learn to use the strategies of dialogic reading.
the less turn takings they have.
the more complex questions they use and less closed and simple questions.

2. Does the quality of linguistic-cognitive support level of teachers in everyday practice improve over the measurement period?

Method

The present German longitudinal study examined the effectiveness of a training combined with individual coaching with regard to the knowledge, attitude and skills of education professionals. The examination period of the study is 2.5 years from 2012 to 2014 and includes three measurement times. The study includes ten training days and three individual video-based coaching respectively mentoring sessions. Topics of the training days were lexical acquisition, acquisition and support of early grammar development, phonological awareness, narrative ability, teacher-child interaction, language development of children in nursery schools, linguistic assessment and early language support in a multilingual setting, skills and support of literacy, working with parents. The sample includes 11 teachers (N = 11). The aim of the analysis is to review the skills of teachers with regard to the use of questioning strategies and turn takings during a storybook reading. Of central importance is the idea that the speaker’s shares are higher at the beginning of the dialogic reading than at the end of the activity, so that children take a more active role in the conversation and the teacher only gives impetus to speech utterances (Kraus, 2005). Primarily this involves the investigation of speech proportion of teachers as well as the use of question strategies. A frequent use of "complex questions" leads to the assumption that teachers lead children to express their opinions, to explain and justify ideas and thus to stimulate metacognitive thinking. The analysis of the question categories was performed by using the KoDEx program "dialog corpus linguistics analysis for EXMARaLDA" (Eisold, 2014). The transcription of the video recordings was performed with the annotation tool EXMARaLDA and was then analyzed with KoDEx. This program is used to analyze the interaction structures during "dialogical storybook reading." It enables the gathering of all speech and reading shares of the persons involved and lists the questions of the teachers in a specially developed category system: closed questions, simple questions, and complex questions. To detect the quality of the interaction quality in educational practice the observational instrument DO-RESI ("Dortmunder Ratingskala zur Erfassung sprachförderrelevanter Interaktionen") by Fried and Briedigkeit (2008) was used. Here, the standardized instrument captures the quality of the interactions between teacher and child in the areas of "organization", “relation”, "adaptive support strategies" and "linguistic-cognitive challenge strategies". The focus of this analysis is on the quality of linguistic-cognitive supportstrategies.

Expected Outcomes

In general, the results underline the national and international research findings concerning the low quality of interaction in child care centers. Regarding the first hypothesis, the results of cross-sectional analysis to change the structures of interaction of videotaped storybook readings using the "KoDEx" program show that the turn taking of teachers decreased from 58,2% to 55,3%. The analysis of the questions of the teachers is equivalent to the previous assumption. The proportion of questions asked has overall increased from 29,7% to 34,3%. A detailed analysis of the question categories "closed questions", "simple questions" and "complex questions" shows that teachers use less closed questions at the third time of measurement than at the first one (40,2% to 34,0%). The use of "simple questions" has increased from the first to third measurement time going from 39,5% to 44,8%. But asking "complex questions" seems more difficult for educators, as these have decreased from 2,7% to 2,2%. Therefore, the results show that teachers first place focus on "simple questions". The second hypothesis deals with the question whether the learned strategies from individual coaching respectively mentoring sessions are used in everyday practice in child care. The quality of interaction has been captured the "Do-RESI". In the present study, the focus is on the field of the quality of "linguistic-cognitive support strategies". The results show that in the field of linguistic-cognitive qualification teachers achieve from 2,97 to 3,83 (mean average) out of a scale of 1 (minimum) to 7 (maximum). The result show a statistically significant result from the first to the third measurement (p < .05). Of central importance is the item "open questions" which, according to interaction analysis, proves the use of questions in everyday practice. In statistical terms it show that the use of questions does not differ significantly between the measurement periods.

References

Arnold, D.H. et al. (1994): Accelerating language development through picture book reading: Replication and extension to a videotape training format. Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 86(2), Jun 1994, 235-243. Eisold, C. (2014): Untersuchungen zum ungesteuerten Kasuspriming in Sprachfördersituationen mit Kindern im Vorschulalter. Unveröffentlichte Masterarbeit. Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Fried, L. (2011): Sprachförderstrategien in Kindergartengruppen – Einschätzungen und Ergebnisse mit DO-RESI. In: Empirische Pädagogik 2011, 25 (4), S. 543-562. Fried, L./ Briedigkeit, E. (2008): Sprachförderkompetenz – Selbst- und Teamqualifizierung für Erzieherinnen, Fachberatungen und Ausbilder. Berlin, Düsseldorf, Mannheim: Cornelsen Verlag Scriptor GmbH & Co. KG. Kuger, S./Kluczniok, K. (2008): Prozessqualität im Kindergarten. Konzept, Umsetzung und Befunde. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, Sonderheft, 11, 159–178. Kraus, K. (2005): Dialogisches Lesen - neue Wege der Sprachförderung in Kindergarten und Familie. In: Roux, S. (Hrsg.): PISA und die Folgen: Sprache und Sprachförderung im Kindergarten. Landau: Verlag Empirische Pädagogik 2005, S. 109-129. König, A. (2009): Interaktionsprozesse zwischen ErzieherInnen und Kindern: Eine Videostudie aus dem Kinder-gartenalltag. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Mashburn, A. J. /Pianta, R. C./Hamre, B. K./Downer, J. T./Barbarin, O./Bryant, D., et al. (2008): Measures of classroom quality in prekindergarten and childen’s development of academic, language, and social skills. Child Development, 79(3), 732–749. Siraj-Blatchford, I. /Manni, L. (2008): Would you like to tidy up now? An analysis of adult questioning in the English Foundation Stage. Early Years 28 (1): 5-22. Siraj-Blatchford, I. /Sylva, K./Muttock, S./Gilden, R./Bell, D. (2002): Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years. DfES Research Report 356. Smidt, W. (2012): Zielkindbezogene pädagogische Qualität im Kindergarten. Waxmann Verlag. Tietze, W. et al. (2012): NUBBEK. Nationale Untersuchung zur Bildung, Betreuung und Erziehung in der frühen Kindheit Fragestellungen und Ergebnisse im Überblick. Url: http://www.nubbek.de/media/pdf/NUBBEK%20Broschuere.pdf (Stand: 27.01.2015) Tietze, W. et al. (2005): Kinder von 4 bis 8 Jahren. Zur Qualität der Erziehung und Bildung in Kindergarten, Grundschule und Familie. Weinheim: Beltz. Tietze, W. (1998) (Hrsg.): Wie gut sind unsere Kindergärten? Eine Untersuchung zur pädagogischen Qualität in deutschen Kindergärten. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Zevenbergen, A. A., & Whitehurst, G. J. (2003): Dialogic reading: A shared picture book reading intervention for preschoolers. In A.Van Kleeck, S. A. Stahl, & E. B. Bauer (Eds.). On reading books to children: Parents and teachers. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Author Information

Angie Lämmerhirt (presenting / submitting)

University of Koblenz-Landau

Landau

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