Patterns of Teacher–Child Conversations in Head Start Classrooms: Implications for an Empirically Grounded Approach to Professional Development

Abstract

Research Findings: This article is based on the premise that the field of early childhood education needs to begin to study the details of teacher–child interaction if it is to understand fully what aspects of classrooms foster development and to create effective professional development interventions. To this end, we report analyses of four Head Start teachers as they talked with children in two settings (blocks and dramatic play) on three different occasions. The conversations were transcribed and coded for teachers' use of strategies that prior research on language development has found to be supportive of language learning. All teachers were found to adopt some strategies likely to foster language growth, but the frequency of strategy use was low. Practice or Policy: Classroom context affected teacher–child conversations for all teachers, supporting the claim that consideration of teacher behavior across contexts can help reveal features of classrooms that shape conversations and that attention to how teachers employ strategies in different settings might enable coaches to better support teachers as they adopt new conversational strategies.

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