The Future of Expulsion Prevention: Examining the Role of Teacher Emotion Regulation on Preschoolers' Exclusionary Discipline Experiences

Background and Purpose: Despite mounting evidence of the harmful effects of school exclusion on children’s developmental outcomes, exclusionary discipline in preschools persists (Zinsser et al., 2022). Researchers are increasingly focused on “soft expulsion,” such as being sent home early due to behaviors under the umbrella of exclusionary discipline. Teacher stress has been implicated in decision-making related to preschool children’s expulsion risk (Loomis & Panlilio, 2022), although has not been as widely examined in regard to decision-making related to soft expulsions. The current study examines whether teachers’ emotion regulation strategies moderate the relationship between child behavior and expulsion risk as well as soft expulsion experiences.

Methods: In the current study, 44 preschool teachers were recruited from six preschool programs in the Mountain West in the 2021-2022 school year. Staff were recruited to take part in a randomized study of trauma-informed training; the baseline (pre-training) data are used in the current study. Teachers’ use of emotion regulation strategies was measured using the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), which was developed to measure how individuals regulate their emotions and includes subscales related to reappraisal and suppression (Gross & John, 2003). Teachers completed a survey for four randomly selected students from their class. Expulsion risk was measured using the total score of the Preschool Expulsion Risk Measure which includes subscales of classroom disruption, teacher stress, fear of accountability, and hopelessness (PERM; Gilliam & Reyes, 2018) and child behavior was measured with the 6-item inhibitory control subscale of the Child Behavior Questionnaire-Short Form (CBQ-SF; Teglasi et al., 2015). A dichotomous soft expulsion variable was created based on whether teachers reported they had asked for the child to be picked up early (n=7), kept home (n=2), transitioned to another program (n=9), or terminated enrollment (n=3).

Results: Two-level multilevel models were run to account for children nested within classrooms. Soft expulsion was measured as binary (yes/no), and Bernoulli models were run, which produced an odds ratio. Teachers’ use of suppression moderated the link between inhibitory control and one indicator of expulsion risk, child disruption (p = .032); children with low inhibitory control were reported as more disruptive to the classroom when teachers endorsed more suppression. Suppression was significantly related odds of soft expulsion (Odds Ratio = 2.24, p = .018) but did not moderate the slope between inhibitory control and soft expulsion (p = .839).

Conclusions and Implications: These findings support the exploration of teachers’ emotion regulation, particularly suppression, as a critical area of focus for expulsion prevention. It may be that when teachers’ shut down their emotions, they externalize their frustration onto the child, a shift from “it’s hard for me to manage the classroom with this behavior” to “this child is disrupting the classroom with their behavior.” More collaborative work is needed to understand the cultural and contextual factors that are related to the emotional regulation strategies of teachers and their potential implications for expulsion prevention.