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Abstract
The widespread stress and burnout in the educational landscape, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic's harmful impact on the mental health and well-being of educators and students, emphasize the need to provide educators and school systems with programs that are feasible, acceptable, and scalable. There is now growing consensus that these programs should aim to improve educators' social and emotional competencies, well-being, and mental health to, ultimately, promote better student outcomes. In Mexico, there is a need for quality social and emotional learning (SEL) in early childhood education. While there is evidence that this hinges on building preschool educators' socioemotional competencies and well-being, there is a gap in quality SEL professional development (PD) for these teachers and principals. Educating for Well-being is a school-wide SEL intervention that aims to improve educators’ well-being and socioemotional competencies and students’ socioemotional and academic outcomes. It consists of a training-based PD program for educators and a SEL curriculum for students. To evaluate the impact of the intervention, a cluster randomized control trial involving 421 preschools in the Mexican state of Sinaloa was conducted. 2,162 educators completed self-reported measures before and after the PD component, and at three and twelve-month follow-ups (four data collection points in total); and teachers completed assessments of 2,423 students before and after the implementation of the SEL curriculum. The results showed that Educating for Well-being has statistically significant positive effects on educators’ self-awareness, emotion regulation, pro-sociality, self-efficacy, and psychological distress. In accordance with the intervention’s theory of change, the PD program first improves educators’ socioemotional competencies and then, in the medium term, increases self-efficacy and reduces psychological distress. Furthermore, after one year of participating in the PD program and implementation of the SEL curriculum with students, we observed statistically significant positive changes in students’ prosocial behavior and emotional regulation. Our findings suggest that intervention impacts on educators’ outcomes are moderated by educator role (principal vs. teacher), school marginalization level, but not by tier of implementation. Children in schools with higher levels of marginalization may derive greater benefit from the intervention than those in schools with lower levels of marginalization.