State of art of interactions quality in Belgian preschool to design individualized professional development programs targeting teachers

Background : During childhood, language develops through interactions with environment. Among living environments of children, preschool would be a suitable place to experiment many high-quality interactions between teachers and children. Knowing this level of interactions quality in preschool classrooms provides information about the level of language support available in preschool education.
Objectives This study aims to assess the level of interactions quality in Belgian French-speaking preschool classrooms.
Methods : Classroom Assessment Scoring System® (CLASS PreK) (Pianta et al., 2008) was used to determine quality of interactions from 92 teachers.
Results : Emotional support and classroom organization are characterized by middle-high quality. In contrast, regarding instructional support, only 10% of teachers achieve middle quality scores. The majority performs poorly on quality scores. Five interaction profiles have been identified. The first two are defined by high quality to emotional support and classroom organization, while the last three are characterized by very low scores in instructional support.
Conclusions : This study suggests that teachers need support to increase instructional support including language support practices. Developing individualized professional development, considering interaction profiles of teachers, would be a successful manner to increase the number of language support practices and finally, to develop children's language skills.