Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education Faculty, Staff Receive Grantsfrom US Department of Health and Human Services

October 1, 2021

Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education Faculty and Student Receive Grants from US Department of Health and Human Services

The Happy Teacher Wellness Intervention Team and OU-Tulsa doctoral student Tonya Thomas have received grants from the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Happy Teacher Wellness Intervention Team was awarded a $2 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families. The grant is titled: "Happy Teacher Wellness Intervention: Creating a Culture of Head Start Staff Well-Being and Competence”.

Built on findings of early childhood teacher well-being from the Happy Teacher Project, the team will conduct an innovative, multifaceted, and tiered center-wide intervention program over four years. The project will be conducted with staff including teachers (lead teachers, assistant teachers) and leaders (center directors, instructional coaches) in center-based Head Start programs in urban areas and two underrepresented populations (rural and tribal nation) in Oklahoma.

The Happy Teacher Wellness Intervention is a ten-week long intervention designed to improve Head Start staff’s physical, psychological, and professional well-being and competence in collaboration with researchers and project team experts from multiple disciplines. The team will examine the effects of the intervention on staff well-being and feelings of competence via a rigorous cluster randomized control evaluation study design.

OU Team Members include Kyong-Ah Kwon (Principal Investigator), Tim Ford, Sherri Castle, Hongwu Wang, Mia Kile, Ken Randall, Jessica Tsotsoros, Seulki Rachel Jang, Brenda Lloyd-Jones, Yong Ju Jung, and Carolyn Cheema. Consultants on the grant are Adrien Malek-Lasater, Chris Amirault, and Barbara Sorrels.

Tonya Thomas, an OU-Tulsa doctoral student in the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education, received a $25,000 Head Start doctoral dissertation grant through the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The grant research will focus on culturally responsive teaching practices and associations with family engagement and child outcomes in Early Head Start classrooms. Dr. Kyong-Ah Kwon will serve as the faculty principal investigator on the project.

The proposed study will examine associations among culturally responsive practices and strategies implemented in classrooms, family engagement, and children’s social and emotional development within a large Head Start agency. This mixed methods study will examine data from Early Head Start classrooms including 60 lead or assistant teachers and 120 parents or guardians of infants and toddlers in a small Midwestern city. During the 2017-2018 program year, Early Head Start (EHS) enrolled nearly 92,000 culturally diverse families and infants and toddlers in center-based programs (Office of Head Start, 2017). The increase in the number of culturally diverse families has significant implications for teachers of infants and toddlers in EHS settings. This grant will research the instructional practices that would best serve culturally diverse infants and toddlers and their families.