Teachers' perceptions of well-being and involvement in preschool children

Abstract

ABSTRACTWell-being indicates that one is doing well emotionally and feeling comfortable with oneself as a person. A low level of well-being signals that a child is not succeeding in fulfilling his/her fundamental needs, such as eating, being hugged, physical contact, a more or less predictable environment, feeling accepted and feeling like he or she is a ‘good’ person. An involved child concentrates his/her attention on a specific focus, wants to continue the activity and to persist in it and is rarely, if ever, distracted. In this qualitative research, we focus on the well-being and involvement levels of children according to circle time activities and on how teachers react when children have low levels of well-being. The data consist of observations covering a total of 76 children from five different classes and focus-group interviews with seven teachers from these classrooms. The questions for the focus-group interview were prepared by the researchers. The tool focuses on two central indicators of quality early-years provision: children's ‘well-being’ and ‘involvement’. The findings show us that teachers consider body language, facial and verbal expressions to be the main criteria for well-being. Children's involvement is considered to be built on both motivation and the impulse to explore. From the observation findings, we could see the children's state of well-being with the ‘relaxation & inner peace’ indicator and that children mostly showed their involvement by exhibiting motivation in their work.