The CLASS-PreK instrument is widely used to evaluate early childhood classrooms, but how classrooms using Montessori, the world's most common alternative education system, fare on CLASS is understudied. Because CLASS focuses largely on teacher-child interactions as the situs of learning, but in Montessori theory, child-environment interactions are…

In Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) programs, the quality of teacher-child interactions is regarded to be important for children's vocabulary development. However, prior studies on the relationships between teacher and child, as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), and children's vocabulary skills are inconsistent.…

This study examined the association between observers and students' reports of instructional support at the classroom-level, and whether students' off-task behavior predicted their perception of instructional support over time. The sample consisted of 1306 students and 79 teachers. Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling was applied to the…

Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…

A sample of 496 early childhood teachers was assigned randomly in two phases to a series of professional development (PD) interventions. Phase I intervention was a 14-week course on effective teacher-child interactions. Participants were then re-randomized into Phase II intervention, which consisted of individual, interactions-focused coaching.…