Better understanding the correlates of teacher stress is critical to develop effective, targeted prevention and intervention efforts to decrease early childhood educator stress and ultimately improve outcomes for educators and young children. Previous studies of early childhood educator stress have mostly focused on teacher professional background and child behavior in relation to stress and rarely simultaneously considered other teacher, classroom, and center factors that may also be related to teacher stress. The current study examined multiple individual and environmental correlates of preschool teacher stress using secondary baseline data from a study of 427 teachers participating in a professional development intervention in early childhood education. Findings indicated that teacher anger, child behavior, and presence of classroom support staff were consistently related to teacher’s experience of stress in the classroom, over and above teacher’s personal and professional backgrounds. Practice or Policy: Implications for better supporting preschool teachers and young children are discussed. Taken together with previous research on teacher stress, these findings can guide future prevention and intervention work to decrease stress and promote teacher well-being in early childhood education. (author abstract)
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United States