Work With What You’ve Got: Improving Teachers’ Pedagogical Skills at Scale in Rural Peru

We evaluate the effect of a large-scale teacher coaching program offered in a context of high teacher turnover on a broad range of pedagogical skills. Previous studies have found that small coaching programs can improve the teaching of reading and of science in a developing country setting. However, scale can compromise quality and turnover can erode compliance. It is also unclear whether general pedagogical skills can be improved through coaching. We evaluate a teacher coaching program currently serving more than 6,000 rural public schools in Peru. We exploit the random assignment of a program expansion that occurred in 2016. We find that, after two years, the program has been effective in improving pedagogical skills with an average effect between 0.24 and 0.34 standard deviations (s.d.). Accounting for non-compliance reduces the program’s effect to between 0.20 and 0.30 s.d. This is below the effect found in developed countries (0.49 s.d.) but remains reasonably large considering the scale of the program and the degree of teacher turnover.