Researchers Use Innovation Tournaments to Unite Families and Educators on Preschool Behavior Interventions

When young children show disruptive behavior in preschool, the solution rarely lies with the child alone. It lies with the adults around them, and above all with whether those adults can work together. A new study published in the Early Childhood Education Journal has taken an unusually systematic approach to that problem, crowdsourcing ideas directly from preschool teachers and families in two major American metropolitan areas to identify what actually blocks cooperation between home and school, and what could fix it. The research, led by Courtney A. Zulauf-McCurdy of the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, is the “discover” stage of a larger effort to build a new intervention called the Parent-Educator Action Response, or PEAR, designed to help teachers and families jointly implement behavioral interventions across both settings.

The scientific context is urgent. The United States is facing a youth mental health crisis, with roughly one in five young people experiencing a mental health disorder, and symptoms of externalizing disorders often first emerge between the ages of three and five. Untreated disruptive behavior in early childhood carries both short-term consequences, such as delays in language and motor development, and long-term ones, including elevated risks of substance abuse and relationship instability. Professional guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend behavioral interventions as the first-line treatment for any preschool-age child who displays disruptive behavior, whether or not a formal diagnosis exists. Because most such children have not yet been diagnosed, preschool classrooms become the de facto front line of early mental health care, and meta-analytic evidence shows that school-delivered interventions can produce clinically significant improvements in child symptoms.

The catch is implementation. Behavioral interventions for preschoolers work by teaching the adults around the child, teachers and caregivers, to promote positive behavior and reduce challenging behavior, and they are most powerful when skills are applied consistently at home and at school. Yet a 2024 scoping review by the same research group found that most evidence-based preschool interventions provide no explicit strategies for coordinating across settings, and that implementation support overwhelmingly targets teachers alone, with no strategies focused on helping teachers work with families. Teachers face limited access to specialized training, scarce resources, and high job-related stress; families contend with competing work and caregiving demands, language and literacy differences, transportation problems, and limited access to mental health supports. Families from historically minoritized backgrounds face additional obstacles, including the risk of differential treatment from teachers rooted in cultural bias and systemic racism within the early childhood education system.

To uncover solutions from the people who actually do this work, the team borrowed a tool from innovation economics: the innovation tournament, a participatory design method in which large numbers of stakeholders generate ideas and then rate them, allowing the strongest candidates to rise to the top. The study unfolded in two phases. Phase 1 took place in the Seattle metropolitan area, drawing teachers and families from two early childhood organizations, including a nonprofit serving more than 500 children and a public school district program in Renton, Washington serving roughly 600 children ages three to five. Phase 2 replicated the tournament in the Chicago metropolitan area, where the team randomly contacted licensed early childhood centers from a comprehensive list and recruited a broader range of participants, including many families enrolled in Head Start. The research was approved by institutional review boards at the University of Washington and Lurie Children’s Hospital, and participants received small gift cards for completing surveys.

The tournament mechanics were deliberately simple but methodologically rigorous. In a first survey, teachers and families answered open-ended prompts asking them to list barriers to implementing behavioral interventions in the classroom, at home, and across both settings, and to generate strategies for making implementation easier and for improving family-teacher relationships. The research team then consolidated redundant ideas and created a second survey in which participants rated every generated barrier and strategy on importance and feasibility, using five-point scales anchored from negative two to positive two. Two independent coders sorted the qualitative responses into categories, then classified each barrier using the Health Equity Implementation Framework, which distinguishes factors tied to individual recipients, the clinical encounter or interaction, the inner setting of home or school, and the outer setting of the broader system. Strategies were classified using the nine categories of the School Implementation Strategies, Translating ERIC Resources framework. Interrater agreement, measured by kappa statistics, ranged from 0.66 to 0.85, indicating substantial to almost perfect agreement. Ratings were then plotted on Go-Zone plots, which cross the mean importance and feasibility values to create four quadrants, with the upper-right zone flagging strategies rated as both highly important and highly feasible.

The participant sample spanned both cities and both constituencies. In Seattle, 20 teachers and 55 legal guardians completed the generation or rating surveys; the rating round included 17 teachers, all women and majority White, with an average of nearly 12 years of experience, and 55 guardians who were racially diverse, identifying as White, Asian, multiracial, Latinx, and Black. In Chicago, 16 teachers and 22 legal guardians completed the first survey, with 10 from each group continuing to the rating round. Chicago families were predominantly Black (72.7 percent), reflecting the enrollment patterns of Head Start sites. Across both cities, participants ultimately generated 17 unique barriers and 26 unique strategies for improving implementation of behavioral interventions.

The pattern in the barriers was striking. Nearly half, 47 percent, fell at the level of the interaction between teachers and families, the “clinical encounter” in implementation science terms, encompassing communication challenges, language differences, inconsistency in expectations, and difficulty getting on the same page about a child’s needs. Another 35 percent sat within the individual teacher or family, dominated by lack of time, financial stress, and emotional exhaustion. In Seattle, teachers and families jointly rated language differences and financial stress as important and feasible to address, while teachers alone flagged lack of trust with families and uncertainty about how to initiate conversations about behavior concerns. In Chicago, teachers rated lack of communication and consistency among staff, limited family awareness of effective interventions, and inconsistency between home and preschool as important and feasible targets, and both groups identified family emotions about behavior concerns, such as denial and frustration, as important but stubbornly difficult to address. Three barriers appeared in both cities: insufficient teacher time, family financial stress, and family emotions surrounding behavior concerns.

On the strategy side, the tournament surfaced concrete, actionable ideas, and differences between teachers and families proved illuminating. In Seattle, both groups converged on three winning strategies: providing multiple communication options, establishing a preferred communication method for each family-teacher pair, and building rapport and trust at the start of the year. Teachers, but not families, rated professional development on communicating with families as both important and feasible, while families, but not teachers, endorsed paid non-instructional time for teachers to communicate and mental health support for teachers, suggesting families perceived systemic supports as more achievable than teachers did. Statistically, teachers rated four strategies as significantly more important than families did, including establishing preferred communication channels and building rapport early, a gap the authors link to prior research showing that teachers’ perceptions of the parent-teacher relationship influence children’s risk of preschool expulsion. In Chicago, teachers elevated six strategies into the priority zone, including making classroom interventions more engaging for children and sharing positive updates, such as photos and progress reports, with families, while families singled out sharing effective behavioral strategies and resources, like sticker charts, as their top priority. Five common strategies emerged across both cities, including increased classroom staffing, preferred communication channels per dyad, and leadership support for teacher-family collaboration.

From this harvest, the team selected five strategies to build into PEAR, chosen because they ranked as important and feasible by at least one group in at least one city, are not adequately covered by existing interventions such as the Pyramid Model or Incredible Years, and fit the intervention’s scope. They are: training teachers in how to communicate with families about behavior concerns, training teachers in effective behavioral intervention techniques, sharing the same behavioral strategies teachers use with families, establishing a preferred communication method for each family-teacher dyad, and deliberately building rapport and trust between families and teachers, ideally early in the school year before frustration hardens. The authors note that teachers often delay telling families about behavior concerns until they have exhausted their own ideas, leaving families feeling blindsided, a dynamic that communication training and early relationship-building are specifically designed to counter.

The study’s authors acknowledge limitations, including modest sample sizes that raise the risk of missed effects in statistical comparisons, convenience sampling in Seattle, and survey differences between cities that prevent direct comparison. They also emphasize that most barriers, time, money, staffing, and stress, are rooted in the undervaluation of the American preschool system itself, with 72 percent of preschool settings short-staffed and large proportions of Black and Hispanic families living in or near poverty, and that no classroom-level intervention can fully compensate for structural underinvestment. Even so, the findings deliver a clear message: when researchers ask teachers and families what they need rather than prescribing to them, the answers converge on relationships, communication, and shared tools. The PEAR team will now move into the design and build phase, constructing an Implementation Research Logic Model and a menu of implementation strategies, before testing the intervention in real preschools. If the discover stage is any guide, the most powerful ingredients in early childhood behavior intervention may not be new techniques at all, but better wiring between the adults who already care for the child.