Early childhood professional culture: Social networks and beliefs among pre-kindergarten educators

Abstract

As efforts are made in the United States for public school districts to implement pre-kindergarten programs and centers, there is a growing need to attend to the aspects of the local context that may influence the ways that teachers and staff make sense of their work. Yet, the professional cultures in which early childhood teachers and other educators make sense of their practice are multi-faceted and not well understood. This study explores the network structures and beliefs among educators in three pre-kindergarten centers. In particular, the mentorship relationships among lead teachers, assistants, instructional coaches, and administrators were explored along with individuals’ beliefs about themselves and others. Findings indicate that early childhood mentoring networks aligned with formal role hierarchies, and were similar to networks seen in elementary school research. Trust among lead and assistant teachers and autonomy were particularly important in the pre-kindergarten settings where two individuals work together as part of a classroom teaching team, and the school serves a single grade level. Suggestions for future research expanding the work on professional culture in early childhood settings are addressed.

Keywords

learning support assistants pre-kindergarten professional culture social networks teacher beliefs teachers

The last two decades have seen tremendous growth in early childhood education in the United States, and around the world. In the United States, this is particularly true in public pre-kindergarten programs. The total number of 4-year-olds enrolled in public pre-kindergarten programs, excluding Head Start programs, has increased from almost 700,000 in the 2001–2002 school year to approximately 1.3 million in 2017–2018 (Barnett et al., 2003; Friedman-Krauss et al., 2019). Enrollment trends and news reports suggest that early childhood programs, public pre-kindergarten in particular, will continue to grow in the near future.

Districts and communities are tasked with creating and implementing their own pre-kindergarten programs and supporting staff to implement them. Teachers and staff must figure out how to work together in a setting with one grade level of instructional focus. There is a growing need to attend to the aspects of the local context that may influence the ways that teachers and staff make sense of their work. Factors that affect the professional culture of the school, including the professional relationships and interactions and individual and collected beliefs are critically important to the sustainability of instructional design, change and improvement (Bryk et al., 1999).

The relatively brief history of public pre-kindergarten programs in the United States, and their frequent distribution across many elementary school sites, means there has been limited opportunity to explore professional culture among pre-kindergarten educators. However, public school centers have opened that focus exclusively on the public education of 4-year-old students. These centers offer the opportunity to explore the professional culture among large groups of pre-kindergarten educators working together. The purpose of this study was to explore the broad question: What is the professional culture among groups of public pre-kindergarten professionals?

Defining professional culture

Professional culture is defined as the social foundation of a community of professionals, in this case educators, comprising the values, beliefs, norms, and patterns of social interaction that are shared among community members and that guide their work (Hargreaves, 1994). Hargreaves (1994) organized the elements of professional culture into two categories: the form and the content. The form of the professional culture is the pattern of social relationships and interactions that occur or exist among members of a community (Hargreaves, 1994; Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012). The content (what) of a professional culture is made up of the values, beliefs, norms, and practices that are shared among members of culture. This can also be described as what teachers say and do and what they believe to be true about themselves and others (Bryk et al., 1999; Hargreaves, 1994; Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012). Kardos and colleagues’ conceptualization of professional culture combines all of the elements in a dynamic social system with on-going mutual influence (Kardos et al., 2001), allowing for the continued interchange of ideas and beliefs among members of the community.

Studies of professional culture in K-12 and international contexts suggest that professional learning communities and other formal structures can be a mechanism through which schools’ leaders can leverage their relationships with teachers to change beliefs and practices. In Kardos and colleagues study of new teachers in elementary, middle and high schools, the teachers found real professional interaction, and the exchange of ideas and practices, in professional cultures where the school leader had deliberately organized structures to encourage this kind of interaction (Kardos et al., 2001). Similarly, in their study of Hong Kong kindergartens, Keung and colleagues found that leaders’ effectiveness at developing PLCs influenced teacher beliefs including shared values and collective efficacy (Keung et al., 2019).

These previous studies of professional culture have included qualitative analysis of educators’ interactions and experiences, and quantitative analysis of teachers’ beliefs and perceptions but little quantitative analysis of the patterns of relationships and interactions among educators within schools’ sites. Social network theory and analysis allow a systematic way to represent, analyze, and understand the form of the professional culture, as well as to illustrate possible pathways for the ideas, beliefs, and practices to interchange among educators in a school.

Studying professional culture in early childhood education

The extant literature about the elements of professional culture comes primarily from K-12 education and, in the United States, does not include pre-kindergarten educators. Public pre-kindergarten programs have historical and structural differences that might lead to differences in professional culture from K-12 settings. The specific needs of pre-kindergarten classrooms and students mean the structures, including staffing arrangements, are not the same as is typically seen in K-12 schools and classrooms.

In pre-kindergarten settings, support personnel play an important role and thus are critical in an examination of professional culture. Teacher assistants represent at least half of the classroom staff in the United States pre-kindergartens and usually work directly alongside the teacher throughout the instructional day. An examination of the professional culture of pre-kindergarten cannot be considered complete without the inclusion of support personnel such as these educational assistants (Mitchell and Sackney, 2007). However, studies that include both teachers and assistants in early childhood and K-12 education are limited (Butt and Lowe, 2012). The addition of teaching assistants to the teaching team is likely to lead to different patterns of social interactions as teachers spend significant time with the assistant in their classroom. Including assistants in work on professional culture provides an opportunity to expand the body of knowledge about their role in early childhood classrooms and centers.

In elementary and secondary school settings, teachers work together in grade level or subject area teams. For pre-kindergarten, however, there are usually only 1–2 teachers teaching pre-kindergarten in an elementary school setting. Though untested, it seems likely the professional culture of the pre-kindergarten staff would be influenced by the professional culture of the elementary teachers and staff in those cases. However, there are also early–childhood-focused centers under the aegis of a public school district with a large number of pre-kindergarten classrooms at a single site. These centers are more similar to private early childhood centers in structure, but often require public school credentials for teachers. With larger numbers of individuals in each position, teachers and assistants could interact in separate subgroups, with little interaction across roles. Previous research has not previously studied professional culture in the public pre-kindergarten centers, nor in the community early childhood centers to which they are most similar.

Social network theory and methods

Social network theory and social network analysis offer a rich approach for understanding the form of professional culture, and to envisioning how the interchange of content can take place. Network theory and analysis explicate more deeply the ways in which individuals are connected to one another, providing insight into the types of relationships that are most likely to influence individuals to change behavior (Knoke and Yang, 2008). Network representation and analysis can include both formal and informal structures (Carolan, 2014).

In social network theory, the social structure is the mechanism through which information, ideas and beliefs (the content of the professional culture) pass among individuals (Kadushin, 2011). Network analysis uses overall structural measures and measures of an individual’s position in a network to understand the benefits and limitations of the overall structure of a network, and of the individual’s access to resources and information. In terms of professional culture, this means that networks provide ways to think about how the formal and informal structures in the community influence an individual’s beliefs, values, and practices.

Network research in education

The recent expansion of social network theory and methods into work on schools and professional teaching has greatly extended the capacity to visualize, analyze, and compare the structures of interactions and collaboration among educators as they implement or change their vision for instruction (Daly, 2010; Moolenaar and Daly, 2012). Types of interactions including collaboration, planning, and mentorship have been explored in K-12 contexts.

Researchers have used quantitative methods to map relational networks in workplaces, schools, and districts visually in order to identify important individuals who could reach many others in support of a curriculum or initiative. Hawe and Ghali (2008) found that connection to many others was critical for leaders, but being connected to individuals who were otherwise isolated or barely connected to the network was especially important.

Several other studies have used quantitatively derived network maps to make interaction patterns within and across groups visible, and to make comparisons across schools. One study found that teachers were densely connected to their grade level teams within schools while another identified groups organized by the length of their teaching experience (Penuel et al., 2009; Spillane et al., 2015). At this point, the structure of networks is unexplored when there is a single grade level at a school, as in the pre-kindergarten schools.

Educators’ beliefs about themselves and others

The beliefs held by members of a professional community are critical content within the professional culture.

Teacher self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is the belief in one’s own capacity to achieve goals or to have control over motivation and behavior (Bandura, 1997). Teacher efficacy is not a static characteristic of a teacher; it is constantly both influencing and being influenced by the teacher’s behavior, and their perceptions of the actions and experiences of those they encounter (Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998). However, teachers’ efficacy beliefs are relatively stable over time and require significant efforts to change (Bandura, 1997; Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998). Empirical literature also indicates that teachers’ efficacy beliefs are generally high, except in situations of school dysfunction or intense negative change (Kleinsasser, 2014). International research suggests that the variability in teacher self-efficacy exists primarily across teachers rather than across schools or countries (Fackler and Malmberg, 2016). There is evidence from South Korea that some of the variability in self-efficacy is derived from age and/or experience increasing positive beliefs about specific aspects of teaching practice (You et al., 2019).

Autonomy

Along with beliefs about their own efficacy, individuals hold beliefs about the flexibility and agency afforded to them in professional settings. Autonomy is the construct used to measure individuals’ beliefs about how much freedom and control they have to carry out those behaviors; it is one of the hallmarks of a profession (Pearson and Moomaw, 2005). Not every worker is afforded the freedom to make decisions about one’s own work, but professionals are characteristically provided the flexibility to organize their own work. For teachers, autonomy is multi-faceted, divided into organizational and pedagogical components (Friedman, 1999). That is, teachers’ autonomy is related to their freedom of action with respect to their classroom pedagogy, as well as to their other professional activities. Empirical work on autonomy has consistently reported a positive relationship between teachers’ autonomy and their job satisfaction, retention, and commitment to teaching (Guarino et al., 2006; Ingersoll and May, 2012), as well as to teachers’ self-efficacy (Lu et al., 2015). However, teacher assistant autonomy in early childhood education remains unexplored.

Collective efficacy

Individuals also hold beliefs about the others with whom he or she works, which can have an impact on how the individual interacts with those others in their community. These are the beliefs that the individual holds about the efficacy of others in their network, as well as their trust and beliefs in the competence of others who are playing different roles in the network, such as teachers, assistants, coaches, and leaders in pre-kindergarten. Collective efficacy is the perceived capability of a system, or school, as a whole (Bandura, 1997). Empirical results have demonstrated that collective efficacy is correlated with, but still conceptually different from self-efficacy (Goddard and Goddard, 2001; Kurz and Knight, 2004; Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2007). Educators with higher perceived collective efficacy have demonstrated a greater investment in their work (Bandura, 2000). While collective efficacy is likely to be influenced by many of the same sources of information as self-efficacy, it is also dependent on the teacher’s social knowledge and interactions with others, making it a potentially useful index of professional culture.

Trust

In the context of teaching and professional culture, repeated interactions with a person or group will influence the trust that builds toward that person or group. Understanding the pattern or structure of social relations can inform both an understanding of current beliefs about the trustworthiness of others, as well as the ways in which social relations might be encouraged in order to develop trust in the future. In early childhood settings, this may include teacher and assistants trust of one another (within and across classrooms), as well as teacher and assistants trust in coaches and school leaders.

The trust among colleagues in early childhood has not been explored, but the positive effects of faculty trust (among teachers) in K-12 settings suggest a key role in professional climate and culture. In their study of Chicago elementary schools, Bryk and colleagues found that beyond school context factors and teacher characteristics, higher levels of teacher–teacher trust were predictors of positive norms and collaborative practices (Bryk et al., 1999). Faculty trust was also positively correlated with collective efficacy and positive instructional strategies, and was identified as a significant predictor of teachers’ commitment to their students (Lee et al., 2011). Similarly, trust has been identified as a key factor related to teachers’ willingness to implement a continuous change model of improvement (Louis, 2007).

Collectively, beliefs about the self and about others comprise a component of the content of the professional culture. Each of these beliefs represents content that may move around through the networks (form) of the professional culture to others within the community, further affecting interactions, norms, and practices. Existing literature indicates that social networks and teachers’ beliefs can be used to index and analyze the professional culture within K-12 schools. It is unclear how applicable to pre-kindergarten settings the knowledge gained from studies about social networks at the elementary and secondary levels will be, and how existing work on teachers’ beliefs will compare to early childhood educators’ beliefs about themselves and others.

Public pre-kindergarten centers offer a novel and potentially distinctive setting to study professional culture because their organizational structures are distinct from existing K-12 settings, and these programs have expanded in public school settings in the United States over the last two decades. Given the especially limited knowledge of professional culture in early childhood education settings, there is also a strong need to index and describe professional culture among pre-kindergarten educators as these programs expand.

Research questions

This study investigated the individual and collective beliefs of individuals and the mentorship networks in public pre-kindergarten centers in order to describe their professional culture. The study was guided by the following research questions:

What are the characteristics of the mentoring networks among the pre-kindergarten educators in public pre-kindergarten centers?

What are the individual and collective beliefs of educators in these public pre-kindergarten centers?

Methods

This study was an exploratory case study (Yin, 2009) of three pre-kindergarten schools. Data collection consisted of an extensive social network and beliefs survey of teachers and other instructional staff in the pre-kindergarten centers.

This study took place in the three public pre-kindergarten centers in a medium-sized city in the southern United States. These schools were selected because they were the only public pre-kindergarten centers in the city. All three schools were opened and operated under the auspices of the public school district, and served only 4-year-old pre-kindergarten students. The three schools were opened in the school year prior to the study to increase the number of pre-kindergarten seats in the district. These three centers were positioned in centrally located, high-poverty communities within the city, but enrolled students from across the entire district. To protect the confidentiality of the participating school sites, each is identified by a pseudonym. Each school site had one director/principal and at least one instructional coach (see Table 1). Classrooms were staffed with one lead teacher and one assistant. All lead teachers were required to meet the district requirements, including holding a bachelor’s degree and a teaching certificate. Additional floating assistants also supported classroom instruction at times.

Table 1.

Descriptive information about study population and response rates.

	All schools	Appleton school	Bridger school	Circleville school
Total number of educators	75	11	36	28
Leaders	11	2	5	4
Teachers	32	5	15	12
Assistants	32	4	16	12
Number of responses	68	11	34	23
Response rate overall (%)	90.67	100.00	94.44	82.14
Leaders	100.00	100.00	100.00	100.00
Teachers	90.63	100.00	93.33	83.33
Assistants	87.50	100.00	93.75	75.00

Formal structures for collaboration and mentorship were in place at the three school sites. Appleton School, with only 11 staff members, included everyone together as a group. Bridger teachers and assistants went to selected Professional Learning Communities in classrooms pairs, with the lead teacher selecting the focus. Finally, at Circleville, teachers and assistants individually chose their Professional Learning Communities, such that one interest group consisted entirely of assistant teachers.

Research participants

This study included all teachers, educational assistants, school directors, and instructional coaches across the 3 schools for a total of 75 participants. In this group, 73 individuals were female (97.3%). The numbers of staff at each school, by position, are shown in Table 1.

All staff in each of the centers was asked by the researcher to participate voluntarily in the study. Table 1 displays descriptive information about the participants who completed the electronic survey and for whom all data are available. The validity threshold for participation in social network analysis is often considered to be between 80% and 85% of the network (Costenbader and Valente, 2003). Overall, the participation rate was above that threshold, as was participation at Appleton and Bridgeville schools. Circleville School had a slightly lower participation rate, but enough participation to warrant inclusion.

Professional culture measure

A researcher-created electronic survey collected teacher reports about their relationships and beliefs for all participants in the spring of 2016. In addition to questions about the participants’ mentorship networks, the staff survey included five additional scales related to teachers’ beliefs or perceptions about a number of topics. These scales were based on existing scales from the literature; items were adapted for the early childhood context and put on 7-point scales to equate the response system across different sections of the survey.

The first section of the survey was derived from existing surveys of network relationships used in studies of social networks in education (Moolenaar et al., 2012; Penuel et al., 2009). Participants were given lists of educators and asked to rate how often they sought professional mentorship from all other participants across all centers. Whole network studies use rosters to allow participants to recognize individuals rather than remember them (Brewer, 2000; Marsden, 2005). Participants had no limits (minimum or maximum) in order to encourage participants to report all mentorship ties.

Self-efficacy

An adapted version of the short form of the Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES; Tschannen-Moran and Hoy, 2001) was used to measure teacher and staff self-efficacy. Reliability has been established for this measure in elementary schools (Cronbach’s alpha = .90). A few items were adapted to be relevant to the pre-kindergarten setting of this study.

Collective efficacy

The collective efficacy scale was adapted from the 12-item Collective Teacher Beliefs scale designed by Tschannen-Moran and Barr (2004). The wording of a few items within each of the subscales was modified to be appropriate for pre-kindergarten teachers and staff. In addition, two of the items from the student discipline scale were removed because they were not relevant to the pre-kindergarten context. The internal reliability for the modified form of the scale used in this study was high (α = .95).

Autonomy

The autonomy scale is based on similar items measured by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) in their annual Schools and Staffing Survey (National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 2011: 35). The first six items focus on the autonomy within the classroom, including selecting materials and teaching strategies and determining the role of teachers and assistants. Reliability was .92 for this sample.

Trust

The trust scale used was derived from the Faculty Trust in Colleagues subscale of the Comprehensive Teacher Trust Scale developed by Hoy and Tschannen-Moran (2003). Items on this scale have been adapted for pre-kindergarten to focus on teachers and assistants, as well as the trust between them. In addition, 2 items were duplicated to report trust separately for teachers and assistants, for a total of 10 items. The reliability in this study was .94.

Coaching

The researcher-created coaching scale consisted of nine items that asked individuals to report on the coaches’ activities and support for teachers and other staff. The reliability for this measure was .93. Participants indicated the extent to which they agree with statements, from strongly disagree to strongly agree including, The coaches have a deep understanding of the instructional practices they share and The coaches’ activities focus on supporting teachers’ implementation of practices.

Leadership

The researcher-created leadership scale was made up of eight items that asked staff members to rate the leadership team at their school. Items for this section were derived from similar items from a number of sources, including the Tennessee Teacher Perception Survey (Tennessee Department of Education, n.d.). Items were adapted to include the pre-kindergarten school directors (principals), as well as multi-classroom leaders/coaches in the schools. Reliability for the leadership measure was .94 for this study.

Data analysis

Representing mentorship networks

Mentorship interactions that occurred on a weekly or more frequent basis were included for analysis. Descriptive information about the mentorship networks across and within the three schools was prepared using IBM SPSS Statistics Version 23 and UCINET software (Borgatti et al., 2002). Next, the relations were mapped and visualized using NetDraw, the mapping program included in UCINET (Borgatti et al., 2002).

To explore the qualities of the networks, measures of the size, and cohesion of the network were calculated. Cohesion is the connectedness of the network, and was assessed using density. Density is the ratio of existing ties in a network to the number of possible ties. Another measure of cohesion within the network is average degree. Degree refers to the number of ties reported by an individual. The average degree refers to the average number of connections for each person in the network. Average degree was calculated as the total number of ties in the network divided by the total number of members in the network.

Exploring individual and collective beliefs

This research question explored the beliefs and perceptions of teachers, assistants, coaches, and directors in the pre-kindergarten centers with respect to efficacy, autonomy, and trust, as well as the coaching and leadership at their school sites. To describe the beliefs at each of the schools, the raw scores for the individual items were aggregated into total scale scores for each of the teacher beliefs/perceptions measures. These aggregated scores were then combined for all of the individuals at a school site and the mean was calculated to create a school-level aggregated mean score for each of the scales. In addition to the mean, the variance, and the range of the scores were calculated for each of the measures at each school.

Results

Mentorship networks

Each of the school networks was a different size, with Appleton School including 11 individuals, Bridger School with 36, and Circleville School in the middle with 28 individuals. Note that Appleton School was much smaller than the other schools, and only a handful of connections by each individual led to a relatively dense network.

Network maps

The next analyses conducted at the school-level were the visualizations of the maps for the weekly mentorship networks. Figure 1 shows the weekly mentorship network at each of the three schools. In the weekly mentorship map at Appleton School (top of Figure 1), a teacher and leader were at the center of the map, with many incoming connections. This suggests that these two individuals were connected to others who are not connected to each other, and were the most central figures for mentorship at this school. On this map, it is also important to note that all four of the assistants are on the edges of the map, indicating less of a presence as mentors to their colleagues.

Figure 1.

Maps of the weekly mentorship networks at Appleton School (top), Bridger School (center), and Circleville School (bottom).

The mentorship network at Bridger School, shown in the center panel of Figure 1, shows fewer connections than the collaboration network. In addition, many of the lines have arrows pointing in a single direction. At the middle of the mentorship network at Bridger School, there are several leaders, with both teachers and assistants adjacent and connected to the leaders. Along the left edge of the map, several pairs of connected teachers and assistants are visible. The arrows among these pairs almost always point from assistant to teacher, indicating that the assistant considers the teacher a mentor, but the teacher does not consider the assistant a mentor. At Bridger School, leaders were most central in the network, but assistant teachers also relied on the lead teacher in their classroom as mentors.

Toward the middle of the mentorship map from Circleville School (the bottom panel in Figure 1), there is an assistant teacher who is connected to other assistants, leaders, and teachers. This is very different from either of the other two schools, where assistants played peripheral roles in the mentorship networks. Toward the bottom of the map, three assistants have several mentorship ties reported to them; assistants were chosen as mentors more often in Circleville School than at Bridger School or Appleton School. The isolated individual at the top left of the weekly mentorship map for Circleville School is an example of an individual who neither sought nor acted as a mentor on a weekly basis.

Network cohesion and shape

The weekly mentorship network at Appleton School had an average degree of 3.27 and a density of .33. Given its larger size, as might be expected, Bridger School had a less cohesive network overall than Appleton School. Bridger School had a higher average degree (3.78) but a considerably lower density at only .10. Circleville School had the largest average degree, 4.36, suggesting that individuals had more ties on average than at the other school, but the density was low at only .16.

Individual and collective beliefs

Table 2 shows the beliefs reported by all participants at the three school sites. Overall, belief scores among participants were positive on the scales, but no ceiling effects were observed on any of the six scales. Circleville School had the lowest mean score on the Teacher-Assistant Trust measure, while Bridger school was characterized by lower collective efficacy and autonomy scores. Appleton School educators reported less positive beliefs about their school leadership.

Table 2.

Individual and collective beliefs across schools and by school.

Scale	Max	All schools		Appleton school		Bridger school		Circleville school		ICC
Scale	Max	M	SD	M	SD	M	SD	M	SD	ICC
Self-efficacy	84	67.04	10.57	65.73	7.48	65.65	11.64	69.74	9.99	.0125
Collective efficacy	63	51.74	9.09	54.55	5.20	49.32	10.39	53.96	7.70	.0654
Autonomy	84	46.74	16.23	47.91	18.34	41.62	15.18	53.74	14.55	.1167
Teacher-assistant trust	70	48.28	13.63	59.36	11.27	50.51	11.96	40.13	12.51	.3586
Coaching	63	44.69	12.71	45.09	15.56	45.18	11.63	43.78	13.33	.0000
Leadership	56	40.94	10.82	36.82	14.18	42.94	9.88	39.96	10.14	.0226

ICC: interclass correlation; SD: standard deviation.

To examine the possibility of differences in beliefs across the three schools further, interclass correlations (ICCs) were obtained for each of the six beliefs scales. Using separate null multi-level models with individuals nested in schools (Snijders and Bosker, 2012), the ICCs indicated significant variance accounted for by site differences only in the autonomy and teacher-assistant trust scales (see Table 2). Little variance in belief scores was attributable to school differences in self- or collective efficacy, coaching or leadership. Using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD) post hoc comparison to explore the item means of the beliefs scale by school (in Table 2), significant differences were found in the autonomy and teacher-assistant trust scales at Bridger School and Circleville School. The mean autonomy item score was significantly higher at Circleville School than at Bridger School, and the mean teacher-assistant trust score was significantly higher at Bridger School than at Circleville School. These two types of beliefs might be related, such that trust goes down when individuals have higher autonomy, perhaps because everyone is free to make decisions and others may not trust those decisions.

Discussion

This study provided the opportunity to examine network structures and beliefs that comprise the professional culture within three pre-kindergarten schools. Although prior work has looked at each of these components separately, and in the K-12 context, little had been done to consider a full picture of professional culture in early childhood education centers.

The results of this study suggest attention to several important points about professional culture in early childhood education to consider further, including the use of social network analysis and beliefs scales. First, the relevance and utility of the types of beliefs studied will be discussed. Then the structures of the pre-kindergarten networks in comparison to other networks studied in the literature will be examined.

Identifying appropriate beliefs

One issue that emerged from the findings of this study was the difficulty of identifying appropriate beliefs to reflect the professional culture of the schools. In this study, only the teacher-assistant trust and autonomy beliefs varied across schools, suggesting that those two beliefs were the most relevant beliefs measured.

Both self and collective efficacy have been explored in educational contexts extensively in the last 30 years. Existing studies suggest that self- and collective efficacy are usually rated highly and seem to be more positive for teachers as the age of their students decreases; Elementary teachers’ self-efficacy is higher than middle and high school teachers (Klassen and Chiu, 2010). This study adds support to these findings, and suggests that teacher reported efficacy might not be variable enough to be useful in indexing or comparing professional cultures.

Autonomy and trust to index professional culture

The lower autonomy scores appear to reflect the leadership-centric formal and informal structures in some of the early childhood settings, where the leaders and coaches made the decisions and the teachers and assistants felt they must go along with them. Thus, the autonomy beliefs at a school may reflect, at least partially, the extent to which lead and assistant teachers feel that the culture of their school does not include decision-making by a range of participants. A 2015 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report suggests that over time more teachers are reporting lower feelings of autonomy, particularly elementary teachers (Sparks and Malkus, 2015). This change may be related to increased accountability pressure and demands that could be experienced by public pre-kindergarten lead and assistant teachers as well.

In the pre-kindergarten schools, the teacher-assistant trust relationship represents the most proximal relationship, but also one that is potentially impacted by power differentials between teachers and assistants. Another potentially important reason to consider trust as a belief is the relationship between trust and the development of positive and mutual relationships. Previous studies report that more positive and mutual relationships are found in schools with higher levels of trust among educators (Daly and Finnigan, 2012). This study supports the same need for trust in order to have positive mutual relationships, but also focuses attention on the teacher-assistant dynamic as critically important.

Autonomy and teacher-assistant trust emerged in this study as being the most useful for understanding professional culture, but they also seemed to be interconnected. At these schools, increased autonomy levels were associated with a decrease in teacher-assistant trust. The existing literature has not addressed this possible association, which may in part be due to the unique early childhood context. For example, if assistant teachers have their own autonomy separate from lead teachers, there could be differences in decisions that lead to difficulty in that classroom relationship. Future work can explore why autonomy and trust might be negatively related in pre-kindergarten settings.

Networks in early childhood education

Due to the structural differences from K-12 contexts, it was posited that pre-kindergarten networks might be different from the education networks previously studied. For example, while most of the elementary schools studied were organized into grade levels (Penuel et al., 2009; Spillane and Kim, 2012), the pre-kindergarten centers involved a single grade level of students. However, the findings from this study suggest that in fact the networks are descriptively similar to the networks seen in other education studies. Overall, the pre-kindergarten networks were structurally similar to the elementary school networks explored in previous studies with moderately connected mentorship networks and few isolated educators. (Daly and Finnigan, 2010; Moolenaar and Sleegers, 2010). The mentorship networks had lower densities than broader networks such as collaboration, as would be expected for a more specific and selective type of relationship. Despite differences in the historical development, ages of the children served, and the formal structures in the pre-kindergarten context, the overall networks were not substantively different from elementary schools.

Where differences do occur in the mentorship networks are in the different positions that assistant teachers take up in the different schools. Elementary schools rarely have assistant teachers, while at the pre-kindergarten schools’ assistants comprise a substantive portion of the instructional staff. At Appleton School, assistants were peripheral, but still connected to the group as a whole. At Bridger, in contrast, assistants were frequently connected to their classroom teacher, perhaps a function of the paired structure of the Professional Learning Communities. Finally, at Circleville School, the assistants seemed to play roles that are more central in the mentorship network, and had the autonomy to choose their own Professional Learning Communities. The formal decisions made about Professional Learning Communities manifest in the networks, and seemed to align with differences in the beliefs as well.

Limitations

While the strengths of this study made it a unique and interesting setting to conduct the research, there were also some limitations to consider. First, the case study described and compared three pre-kindergarten only schools. This was the entire population of such schools in the city, but is a relatively small sample for generalizability. The different sizes of the schools restricted some of the comparisons across the three schools. Appleton School was so small that the classrooms were in visual sight of one another, making it qualitatively different from the other two. In this school, physical proximity and very frequent communication among all staff members had the potential to lead to a very dense social network, and highly similar beliefs among teachers.

In addition, this study focused on quantitative analysis of both the social network structure and the teacher’s beliefs. This study thus focuses on the patterns within the networks and beliefs, rather than digging deeper into individual’s social ties or their professional beliefs about themselves and others. Future qualitative data from this and other contexts could enhance our understanding of professional culture in early childhood contexts.

Finally, the social network and beliefs data were collected simultaneously. As a result, it was not possible to explore any potential direction to the associations between network structures and beliefs at any of the three schools. In other words, it was not possible to examine whether beliefs were structuring network interactions or network interactions were affecting beliefs.

Future research

This study provides a point of entry into the examination and comparison of professional culture in early childhood education setting. However, the findings suggest additional work to be done. First, future work should go beyond a static view of professional culture and consider multiple time points of lagged data collection to explore directional effects and change over time. In addition, the inclusion of qualitative methods such as interviews, observations, or focus groups, or mixed methods studies would enhance our understanding of the components of professional culture within early childhood centers.

It will also be important for future administrators and researchers to examine trust and autonomy at schools, particularly among educators in teacher and assistant roles. Given the close proximity of teachers and assistants in their daily classroom work, the potential for the trust beliefs to impact values, norms, and practices is significant. The relationship between trust and autonomy beliefs should also continue to be examined among a range of early childhood educators.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sascha C Mowrey

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