How urban early childhood educators used positive guidance principles and improved teacher-child relationships: a social-emotional learning intervention study

Twenty-four early childhood educators in an urban city in the United States completed a social-emotional learning course as part of an intervention to explore how teachers learn to value and practice positive guidance principles. Affection between 124 teacher-child dyads was tracked weekly to measure change in teacher-child relationships. Phenomenological collaborative inquiry and inferential statistics were used. Findings: (1) positive relational principles (e.g. validate feelings; provide choices; demonstrate love, and others) succeeded in redirecting child behaviour, solving inter-personal conflicts and improving teacher-child relationships, (2) the extent to which teachers valued and became proficient using 8 principles significantly increased (avg. ES = .35), (3) teacher-child affection significantly increased by the end of the course (ES = .91–2.18). Providing competency-based coursework in social-emotional learning with ample opportunities for educators to practice positive guidance approaches can improve the extent to which loving relationships are experienced. Recommendations for practice, policy and research are shared.