Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A central education policy question is how to improve teachers' classroom effectiveness. Research in the United States on teacher value-added, and in Latin America on observed classroom practice, has consistently documented large variations in teachers’ practice and classroom-level results, even among teachers in the same school teaching the same grade and subject.

The growing evidence that teachers’ classroom practice varies widely, has important impacts on student learning and socioemotional skills development, and cannot be predicted by the observable characteristics commonly used to hire and promote teachers implies at least two major policy challenges. First, school systems need better ways of identifying candidates with the potential for excellence and/or of weeding out lower-potential teachers early in their careers. Second, school systems need effective strategies for improving the classroom practice of the existing stock of teachers.

This paper focuses on the second challenge: improving the effectiveness of teachers in service. We conduct a randomized evaluation of a program in the Brazilian state of Ceará designed to improve teachers’ effectiveness by increasing their professional interaction and sharing of classroom practice. In 175 of 350 secondary schools, teachers were provided with benchmarked feedback from classroom observations and access to expert coaching. Schools’ uptake of the coaching program was high (85 percent). Over a single school year, the program increased teachers’ time on instruction and student engagement and produced statistically significant gains in student learning on both the Ceará state assessment and the national secondary-school exit exam. Schools exposed to the program had 0.05-0.09 SD higher performance on the state test and 0.04-0.06 SD higher scores on the national test. Implementation fidelity strongly boosted program impacts; in the 49 schools where pedagogical coordinators achieved the highest certification at the end of the program, student scores were 0.13-0.23 SD higher on the state test and 0.13-0.17 SD higher on the national test. Coaching delivered by Skype kept the costs of the program low—$2.40 per student—and produced cost-effective impacts on learning in comparison with other rigorously evaluated teacher-training interventions. The combination of classroom observation feedback and expert coaching appears to be a promising strategy for whole-school efforts to raise teacher effectiveness. This evaluation is the first developing-country study to generate rigorous evidence on the impact of a teacher development program aimed at improving teachers’ classroom practices.

The Ceará program has important advantages over many other models of in-service teacher development. First, it has lower unit costs, because it avoids the logistics expenses of off-site programs and makes efficient use of ICT (video analysis and Skype interactions) to connect schools with expert coaches. Second, it leverages skills already present in schools. Third, by building on the expertise of pedagogical coordinators and stimulating interaction among teachers, the program creates a platform for gradual and continuous reinforcement of improved teaching techniques. Given the reality that changing adult behavior is difficult, this may prove to be a necessary condition for improving teacher practices.