This paper presentation describes Project GROW, which is a US federally-funded design project that provides free online professional development for early childhood teachers, training them to implement research-based practices while reading to their young student to support vocabulary development and social and emotional learning. We will briefly review current literature on interventions combining structured literacy and social and emotional learning (SEL) constructs (e.g., motivation, mindset) for young children which informed our development of new curricula and instructional materials and why we chose to focus on early literacy and language related to SEL. The purpose of this presentation is to describe the curricular materials and teacher training procedures, and to examine the results from a quasi-experimental study. The study involved 4 urban schools in the Southern US. Participants included 14 early childhood teachers and 150 students (grades pre-k through first grade). A majority of students received free and reduced price lunch and roughly half were emerging bilinguals (i.e., Spanish first language).

Project GROW researchers provided teachers with 20 commercially available picture books related to our 5 SEL thematic units: I can name my feelings, I can learn from my mistakes, I can persist, I can be kind to myself and others, I can work toward and achieve goals. Each unit has teacher materials (i.e., picture vocabulary cards, scripted lessons, and hands-on activities). The corpus of GROW vocabulary words is ambitious, with an average age-of-acquisition of over 7 (e.g., achieve, collaborate, emotions, persevere).

Project GROW researchers trained early childhood teachers to read aloud to their students using research-based dialogic reading techniques that encourage students to use the GROW vocabulary, to answer a hierarchy of questions, to retell the stories, and to relate the themes to their own home and school communities. Teacher training included innovative techniques combining online learning and virtual-reality simulations. Mursion, the virtual reality platform, has young child avatars in a simulated early childhood classroom setting. Researchers used Mursion to model lesson components and to demonstrate how teachers could support struggling students’ comprehension of the storybook themes and extend their understanding and use of the vocabulary to answer questions about the themes.

Data collection involved classroom visits, fidelity checks, and feedback from teachers about feasibility or ease of implementation. Researchers also tested students growth on proximal curriculum-based GROW vocabulary assessment monthly (before and after each unit). They also tested students growth on standardized measures of vocabulary and self-regulation and classroom behavior. Data were analyzed using mixed-methods approaches. Results indicated teachers reported GROW lessons were easy to implement (feasible) and researchers observed high fidelity of implementation. Students not only learned the GROW SEL vocabulary, but also demonstrated significant improvement, with large effects, on measures of generalized vocabulary and behavioral self-regulation. We will discussion limitations and directions for future research. An important implication of the study is that innovative new trends in training early childhood educators may be promising to close research to practice gaps, leading to improved literacy and social and emotional outcomes.

Keywords: Early childhood, teacher training, social and emotional learning, early literacy, vocabulary, multicultural.