Fostering High-Quality Teaching With an Enriched Curriculum and Professional Development Support: The Head Start REDI Program

This randomized controlled trial tested whether teaching quality in Head Start classrooms could be improved with the addition of evidence-based curriculum components targeting emergent language or literacy and social-emotional development and the provision of associated professional development support. Participants were lead and assistant teachers in 44 Head Start classrooms. Teachers received 4 days of workshop training along with weekly in-class support from a mentor teacher. End-of-year observations indicated that compared with the control group, intervention teachers talked with children more frequently and in more cognitively complex ways, established a more positive classroom climate, and used more preventive behavior-management strategies. Results supported the conclusion that enriched curriculum components and professional development support can produce improvements in multiple domains of teaching quality.