Date of Award
8-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Teaching and Learning
Committee Chair/Advisor
Mindy Spearman
Committee Member
Sandra Linder
Committee Member
Anna Hall
Committee Member
Lisa Aker
Abstract
The benefits of quality social-emotional instruction in early childhood programs are well established. The crux of delivering these benefits lies in teacher social-emotional decision-making in early childhood classrooms. While there is scant research on the topic, there is evidence that decentralizing social-emotional decision-making can help teachers achieve better outcomes by including families and other early childhood professionals, using data to inform decisions, and reviewing research. The current study is a multi-case qualitative analysis of two 4K teachers from a child development center in the South Carolina Upstate. It describes how the two subjects use social-emotional decision-making to support their students’ development. The researcher took observational notes on six children, three from each teacher, and interviewed them about their social-emotional knowledge, valuing their voice and extracting usable data from their responses. The researcher then interviewed the two teachers about the observations and child interviews to investigate how they would make social-emotional decisions to support each student’s development. The researcher used constant comparative analysis to conclude how the 4K teachers made social-emotional decisions. He derived a pyramid model that illustrates how stress level influences the teachers’ formality in decisions. At the base of the pyramid, stress is low, decisions affect all students principally because they involve preparing the learning environment, and they are formal because they are pre-planned. Stress is more present in the second tier, but decisions are less formal as they are characterized by more spontaneity and less decentralization. There is a targeted number of students in this tier. The peak of the pyramid includes a few children. It is characterized by high stress, which drives the level of formality in the decisions upward through more planning/less spontaneity, and more decentralization. Lastly, the researcher offers alternative models that include pivoting decision-making around student needs instead of stress and including a model that increases accountability measures.
Recommended Citation
Johnston, Keith, "Exploring Teacher Decision-Making Based on 4K Children’s Emotional Observations and Narratives: A Multiple Case Study" (2025). All Dissertations. 4037.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/4037
Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3875-2489