Teachers play a key role in student learning, but some teachers lack the skills needed to be effective teachers. A recent nationwide-scale teacher coaching program in rural areas of Peru evaluated the impact of a teacher coaching program on teachers’ skills and student learning. Previous studies find that small-scale coaching programs can improve teaching of reading and science in developing countries. However, scaling up can reduce programs’ effectiveness. The evaluation of this teacher coaching program exploited random assignment of that program’s expansion to 3,797 schools in rural areas of Peru. After two years, teachers assigned to the program increased their aggregate pedagogical skills. The program also increased student learning.

Motivation

Teacher quality is a key determinant of student learning. Unfortunately, many teachers have incomplete knowledge of the subjects they teach, or lack the pedagogical skills to teach them effectively. This is particularly true for teachers in developing countries (World Bank, 2018). This raises an important issue for policymakers in developing countries: What can be done to increase teachers’ skills?

Teacher Training in Developing Countries

In fact, developing countries spend large amounts of money on teacher training programs, which are intended to increase teachers’ skills. More specifically, each year developing countries spend over $1 billion on teacher training.

Evidence on the effectiveness of teacher training in developing countries is mixed, and programs vary widely in form and content. Researchers have found that programs with face-to-face training, follow-up visits, engagement of teachers to obtain their ideas, and adaptation to local context, tend to have larger effects on student learning. Teacher coaching programs often have these features because they involve school visits, classroom observations, and personalized feedback for teachers by trained peers or coaches. Thus, coaching programs are a promising alternative to traditional in-service training that offers intensive sessions to large numbers of teachers at a centralized venue.

Peru’s Teacher Coaching Program

Peru has implemented several teacher coaching programs in recent years. Castro et al. (2024) estimated the effects on teachers’ pedagogical skills and on student learning of a teacher coaching program implemented in rural multi-grade schools in Peru. (Multi-grade schools are very small schools with only one, two or three teachers, so that each teacher has a class with students in two or more grades.) Trained coaches visit classrooms about once per month to give specific advice to teachers on their pedagogical practices, and to provide customized strategies to improve their skills. The estimated effects are based on random assignment of 6,218 schools (3,797 to be treated, and 2,421 to be control schools) when the program expanded in 2016. Teacher skills were measured in late 2017 (after nearly two years of treatment) by observing teacher-student interactions and a broad range of instructional practices in a randomly selected subsample of 166 treated and 174 control schools. Student skills were tested in grades 2 (late 2016) and 4 (late 2018) for all public schools with five or more students in those grades, which provides student test score data for 2,567 of the 6,218 randomly assigned schools.

As in many developing countries, Peru’s rural schools have very high rates of teacher turnover. Of the teachers in the subsample of 340 schools with teacher skills data, about 43% had moved between 2016 and the start of 2017. Importantly, classroom observation data were collected not only in these 340 schools, but also in many (but not all) of the schools that received the teachers who moved from these schools to other schools between 2016 and 2017.

Results of the Evaluation

The main findings of this evaluation are as follows. For the teachers who were teaching in the schools assigned to the program, we find that the effect of two years of coaching increased their pedagogical skills by a modest amount. Turning to specific skills, the largest effects are for lesson planning and, to a lesser extent, encouraging students’ critical thinking.

The evaluation also estimated the impact of the program on student learning after one and three years (we have no data on student learning for the second year). After one year, the program increased the learning of Grade 2 students who took the 2016 National Student Evaluation by amounts that are equivalent to about 0.20 years of schooling for mathematics and 0.15 years of schooling for reading comprehension.¹ After three years of exposure to the program, the estimated impacts on mathematics and reading comprehension test scores for a student who was exposed to teachers who were coached in all three years, are equivalent to about 0.35 and 0.30 years of schooling, respectively.

These estimates for the effect of coaching on pedagogical skills are smaller than those found in developed countries. This may reflect the scale of the program, and Peru’s high rate of teacher turnover. Yet this study addresses two unresolved questions on coaching’s impact on teachers’ pedagogical skills in developing countries by showing that: (i) a program implemented at scale, even with high teacher turnover, can still exhibit positive impacts; and (ii) general pedagogical skills can be increased.

Discussion

While this program was successful in increasing teachers’ skills on students’ learning, there are some caveats that should be kept in mind. First, the success of any coaching program depends on the supply of qualified coaches. If these skills are scarce, expanding the program to a national scale will likely reduce its quality, and thus its effectiveness. Indeed, the impact of this program is not particularly large, which may be due in part to its large scale. Second, classroom observation and personalized feedback in rural areas requires coaches to travel to several schools. This can be costly and can complicate program delivery if scaling-up implies serving schools in very remote areas. Indeed, this program was relatively expensive, and so there may well be other programs that increase student learning at a lower cost.

Author’s Note:

This column is based on Castro, Juan, Paul Glewwe, Alexandra Heredia-Mayo, Stephanie Majerowicz, and Ricardo Montero. “Can Teaching Be Taught? Improving Teachers’ Pedagogical Skills in Rural Peru." Quantitative Economics (forthcoming).

Note:

1. These calculations that express increases in test scores in terms of equivalent years of schooling are based on estimates in Singh (2020), who expresses increases in test scores in terms of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores.

References

Castro, Juan, Paul Glewwe, Alexandra Heredia-Mayo, Stephanie Majerowicz, and Ricardo Montero. “Can Teaching Be Taught? Improving Teachers’ Pedagogical Skills in Rural Peru." Quantitative Economics (forthcoming).

Singh, Abhijeet. 2020. “Learning More with Every Year: School Year Productivity and International Learning Divergence.” Journal of the European Economic Association 18(4): 1770-1813.

World Bank. 2018. World Development Report: Learning to Realize Education's Promise. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.

* Thumbnail image: School children wearing traditional Peruvian costume at school. (Hugh Sitton/ Stone/ Getty Images)
** The views expressed in the columns are those of the author(s) and do not represent the views of IDE or the institutions with which the authors are affiliated.