Workforce PROMISE

 What is PROMISE?

Promoting Resilience and Mental Health in Educational Settings for Early Childhood (PROMISE) is a comprehensive program that includes family and workforce components designed to promote a culture of school-wide social emotional well-being for children, families and staff in early learning settings.

What is the goal of PROMISE?

The goal is to optimize early childhood developmental outcomes and children’s readiness for school by promoting parent and teacher resilience and mental health.

What challenge does PROMISE hope to address?

High quality early childhood education (ECE) is a well-established, cost-effective approach to promoting children’s healthy development and school readiness. It narrows the opportunity gap for low-resourced families and promotes positive outcomes across the lifespan. Comprehensive programs provide an array of services to families but when children and parents have mental health needs or when teachers are stressed and experiencing burnout, programs may benefit from additional support.

What is Workforce PROMISE?

The workforce components of PROMISE offer culturally responsive well-being supports to teachers, staff, and leaders of early childhood education centers in Washington, D.C. The program is supported with federal and foundation funding.* It is being developed in partnership with three Early Head Start programs in DC, University of Maryland at College Park, and the American Institutes for Research.

Three of the four components are being tested together in a randomized clinical trial with 30 centers in the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 program years.

 *Administration for Children and Families Head Start University Partnership grant (#90YR0128).

What does Workforce PROMISE hope to address?

Large numbers of children growing up in low-resourced families will spend time in the care of others. Research on the importance of teacher mental health and well-being for early care and education quality and child outcomes suggest that there are both individual and organizational factors that contribute to teacher stress, burnout and mental health. Teaching is especially stressful for those who serve infants and toddlers because of sub-standard wages and secondary trauma that can result from addressing the needs of families exposed to high levels of adversity.

 How does Workforce PROMISE work?

The facilitators of Workforce PROMISE deliver the program in partnership with staff at the project’s program partners to provide programming to improve the mental health and wellbeing of both children and their parents. These supports are provided through several programmatic structures:

• Mentor-Teacher Learning Collaborative (M-TLC)

• TeacherWISE

• Compassion, Practice, Relationships and Restoration (CPR2)

• LeaderWISE

Mentor-Teacher Learning and Collaborative (M-TLC)

The Mentor-Teacher Learning and Collaborative (M-TLC) program provides early education staff with the opportunity to learn through safe, caring, and responsive peer-mentoring. Mentors use professional development resources developed by the Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas to promote educator’s well-being and competence at interacting with children’s in ways that promote children’s social-emotional learning, teacher-child relational health, and a positive classroom climate with the goal of improve positive developmental outcomes for children and school readiness.

The approach is designed to promoting a trauma-responsive school climate that recognizes educators as experts (mentors) in early childhood education; provides non-evaluative learning opportunities for educators (mentee/protege); enhances social connections among educators (organizational capacity); and encourages restorative practices amongst educators through social emotional learning (SEL) peer-mentoring in classroom settings and facilitator-led M-TLC sessions (equity-focused)

LeaderWISE

LeaderWISE is a professional learning collaborative (PLC) for leaders of early learning centers that provides administrators and members of their leadership team with opportunities for reflection and learning with peers about social-emotional leadership and creating a program-wide culture of social-emotional well-being. The sessions are aligned to TeacherWISE so leaders can focus on their own self-care and support staff use of the program to support their own well-being. The PLC meets twice monthly and between sessions leaders and their team receive individualized support to use data on staff perceptions of the workplace and their own wellbeing to set program-level goals and implement strategies that foster a more supportive and healthy work environment.

TeacherWISE

TeacherWISE is an online professional development program that is designed to promote educator well-being (Bostic, et al, 2019). The program is designed to foster teacher resilience by offering research-based information and strategies in five areas of daily living (physical, occupational, intellectual, social, and emotional wellbeing). The online version of TeacherWISE is 6.5 hours long. The content is organized into eight modules that include didactic videos, informal personal assessments, reflective exercises and health promotion practices. Each module begins with an introduction to the topic followed by the presentation of component-specific strategies that the user can learn and practice to enhance their wellbeing in that area. Participants take a self-assessment at the beginning of the course which informs their own personalized wellbeing plan. Participants are encouraged to create individualized SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based) goals related to each area of wellbeing.

Compassion, Practice, Relationships and Restoration (CPR2)

Compassion, Practice, Relationships & Restoration (CPR2) is a group-based well-being program for early educators that helps participants understand how to manage their stress and advocate for their own well-being. The group format creates a safe and supportive space for reflection, connection, and healing among early educators. Sessions are delivered weekly for an hour and a half across an 11-week period. The session content is complementary to TeacherWISE, with a strong focus on learning mindfulness strategies to promote effective stress management and emotional regulation. Engaging and fun group activities provide an opportunity to strengthen interpersonal relationships and develop a sense of cohesion in the group.

The Workforce PROMISE team includes ECIN faculty and staff, program partner mental health staff, and DC Department of Behavioral Health Healthy Futures mental health consultants serving children and families. 

For more information, email ECIN.