Fostering high-quality reading interactions in pre-service early childhood teacher education

• The study explores student teachers’ reading interactions and relationships with preschool-aged children. • The students showed high-quality emotional support and classroom organization. • They displayed low-quality concept development and language modeling. • The students reported more closeness and less conflict in their relationships after training. This intervention study aimed to foster and assess early childhood education (ECE) student teachers’ professional competence at the beginning of their second year in Finnish higher education. A study module on child development and ECE pedagogy provided the students with knowledge and practice in identifying, implementing, and reflecting on high-quality interactions with children. The students’ video-recorded picture book reading interactions with two preschool-aged children were assessed using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Pre-K tool. The broad domain-level analyses showed high-quality emotional support and classroom organisation, but the quality of instructional support was relatively low. Behavioural-level analyses revealed that the students predominantly asked simple questions; they rarely posed complex questions or provided extensive feedback, and other types of discussions to boost children’s higher-level thinking and language use were practically absent. After the study module, student teachers’ self-reported closeness with children increased and conflict decreased. The findings are discussed from the perspective of fostering and assessing higher-quality instructional support in teacher preparation programmes.