Date
5-20-2026
Department
School of Education
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in Education (PhD)
Chair
Janice Kooken
Keywords
preschool, self-care, professional development, teacher burnout, preschool teacher, infant teacher, teacher self-care, mindful self-care, burnout, early childhood, early childhood education, early childhood teachers, teacher training, teacher professional development
Disciplines
Education | Online and Distance Education
Recommended Citation
Gibby, Tiffany, "Self-Care Professional Development on Preschool Teachers’ Mindful Self-Care and Burnout: A Quantitative Research Study" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 8413.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/8413
Abstract
The purpose of this quantitative, experimental, pretest-posttest control-group design study with random assignment is to determine if self-care training changes mindful self-care and burnout scores of preschool teachers. The study fills the gap in the literature on whether an ongoing professional development approach to self-care is effective. The issue is more research is needed to determine if there is a difference in self-care activity and burnout scores between preschool teachers who receive self-care training and those who do not receive self-care training, when controlling for pre-test scores. The sample was 125 full-time, preschool teachers working in childcare centers drawn from a convenience sample in the United States during the 2024-2025 school year. Data were collected, through Qualtrics, using the Maslach Burnout Inventory Educators Survey (MBI-ES) with the purpose of measuring the burnout subscale of emotional exhaustion of the participants and the Mindful Self-Care Scale-Brief (MSCS-Brief) with the purpose of measuring the frequency of actions that measure behaviors of the self-care subscale of mindful awareness. The ANCOVA results indicate a statistically significant difference in mindful self-care between preschool teachers who received self-care training and those who did not, when controlling for pretest scores. The one-way MANCOVA results indicate that there is not a statistically significance difference in burnout scores of preschool teachers who receive self-care training and those who do not, when controlling for pre-test scores of emotional exhaustion. These findings indicate that the study’s intervention improved the mindful self-care of preschool teachers. It is recommended that further research examine populations of less experienced teachers, recruit a larger sample size, and have an interactive support community.
