Preschool teachers display a flexible pattern of pedagogical actions in promoting healthy habits in children

Abstract

The school represents the optimal setting for promoting the physical, emotional, and social health of children, especially during the first years of life. Understanding the pedagogical actions of teachers to address health education is an important first step in promoting healthy behaviors in children. We inhere analyzed the pedagogical action patterns in the preschool teaching of healthy habits from a holistic health perspective. We used photography as a strategy for data collection and applied a Chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) classification tree, a data mining procedure, to generate a pattern model. We found that the school space and the learning playfulness strategies for the development of executive functions, classified according to the exercise, symbolic, assembly, rules (ESAR) model, were the main factors that influence the pedagogical actions fostering healthy habits. By contrast, the school and the pedagogical resources of the classroom are factors with a much smaller impact on working with healthy habits. This pedagogical action pattern is flexible, since teachers conduct a multiplicity of pedagogical actions through different strategies, in different school spaces, at any time. In conclusion, our results unmask the interdependent relationships between the different factors that determine the teacher's actions at the preschool. It also contributes to the understanding of the teacher's practices in fostering healthy habits in a healthy learning environment.

Keywords: CHAID analysis; ESAR model; health education; healthy school environment; preschool teachers; teaching strategies.

Figure 1

Classification of photographs into the different categories of four variables of the study. (A–F) Illustrative photographs taken in the study; Written informed consent to take photographs at the school was obtained from the individuals participating in this study and /or their representatives; people’s faces have been blurred to ensure privacy. The categorization table shows the classification of these six photographs into the categories of the health dimension, educational resource, ESAR Facets, and Spaces variables. See text for details.

Figure 2

Classification tree using the exhaustive Chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) algorithm to predict the patterns of the pedagogical actions of teachers in the promotion of children’s healthy habits.