Having a qualified, stable, and healthy workforce is a critical component of a thriving early care and education (ECE) system. However, ECE educators—especially those who are women of color—have long encountered low wages and a lack of benefits, coupled with a physically demanding and stressful work environment. Burnout and teacher turnover are common in the ECE field, which can make it challenging for child care centers to hire and retain educators and can create an unstable environment for children. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this challenge intensified, highlighting a real need for the ECE field to make educator well-being a larger priority.

This brief presents the results of a mixed-methods study—conducted by MDRC and MEF Associates as part of the Expanding Children’s Early Learning (ExCEL) Quality project—that explored the feasibility of offering a series of virtual stress management workshops to educators, educators’ perceptions of those workshops, and the overall mental health and well-being of educators who participated in the study. The workshops were offered to educators (that is, teachers and administrators) from Head Start and community-based ECE centers during the 2020-2021 school year, which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Findings suggest that teachers are interested in attending virtual stress management workshops, especially teachers who are struggling with their psychological well-being, and show that stress management workshops have the potential to be one component to building a qualified, healthy, and stable ECE workforce.