The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of coaching program on interactions between childcare teachers and infants. At this moment that childcare is moving from family to daycare center for infants due to the entry of women in public affai...
The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of coaching program on interactions between childcare teachers and infants. At this moment that childcare is moving from family to daycare center for infants due to the entry of women in public affairs and free childcare services, it is urgent for us to improve the interactions between childcare teachers and infants.
As childcare service users’ expectations level on the quality of childcare increases day by day, childcare teachers’ childcaring ability is desperately needed. Especially, in one’s infancy, secure attachment’s development through building trust with the interactions between infants and his/her primary caregivers have much influences even on one’s adulthood. Therefore, the coaching program activating the interactions between childcare teachers and infants is needed.
For the improvements of quality of childcare services, this study tries to provide the basic data for the research of the interactions and the coaching program which can improve the effects of the interactions between childcare teachers and infants.
The research questions is as follows
1. What are the components of the coaching program for infants?
2. What is the analysis of the coaching program's effects for infants on childcare teachers and infants’ interaction
For the purpose of investigating the efficacy of this program on the interaction between childcare teachers and infants, this study uses the subscale ‘program for infants’(modified into Likert 5-points scale by Hong Geun Min, 1997).
The 40 childcare teachers of 8 daycare centers in Seoul participated in this study, and 20 were assigned to control group and the other 20 were assigned to experimental group. The data collected from this study were quantitatively analyzed by SPSS WINDOWS 12.0 using Mann-Whitney U Test.
the result was summarized as follows:
First, the application of coaching model into the interaction between childcare teachers and infants showed that using positive language and coaching model technique such as two-way questions in experimental group allowed experimental group’s infants to think and act by themselves, and encourages the infants to expand their play. For example, before the childcare teachers in experimental group learn the coaching program, when the infants were fighting each other for toy, they interacted with the infants directively, intimidating way, and unilaterally: “No, don't take another’s toy, you better play with another toy.” But after their learning the coaching program, they showed the two way understanding and the interaction which allowed infants to plan and act by themselves: “do you wanna play with this toy? how about playing with another one singing children’s song. It is showed that A diversity of questions based on dialogue model was appropriate for the interaction. Although infants lacks verbal expressions and are hard to understand other’s verbal expressions, it was effective for infants to allowing, encouraging them and showing praise with them through eye contact, expressions and action. The coaching model which modifies coaching dialogue model(Do Mihyang, 2010) was implemented step by step, and showed great effectiveness for the improvement of interaction between childcare teachers and infants.
Second, the analysis of the coaching program’s effect showed the improvement of interaction between childcare teachers and infants, and increased the positive language using. Furthermore, the positive interaction through praise and encouraging done in the coaching program could improve infants’ self-perception and self-esteem: for example, instead of simple evaluation and unilateral praise such as “you did such a good job!”, the positive interaction which concretely emphasize and encourage infants’s achievement and intention to make an effort such as “you did good job of something, something...., you did your best like this..”
This study demonstrated that the coaching program for infants was very effective dialogue model for the interaction between daycare teachers and infants. It is hoped that this program will be adopted for teacher’s core curriculum. Because almost daycare teachers have been taught in directive, exclusive and unilateral ways, infants were also taught in those ways, childcare teacher-leading childcare’s negative language using instead of infants-leading childcare’s positive language using have been prevalent among childcare teachers. If infants are accustomed to the positive langauge using, it can implant positive value into infants, improve the quality of childcare, and show greater effects on the interaction between childcare teachers and infants.