When Promising Interventions Fail : Personalized Coaching for Teachers in a Middle-Income Country

Children in developing countries have deep deficits in math and language. Personalized coachingfor teachers has been proposed as a way of raising teacher quality and child achievement. The authors designed acoaching program that focused on one aspect of teacher quality—teacher-child interactions—that researchers ineducation and psychology have argued is critical for child development and learning. The coaching program wasimplemented in Ecuador, with 100 1st grade teachers randomly assigned to treatment and 100 to control. Coaching improvedthe quality of teacher-child interactions but reduced child achievement. These results underline the importance ofevaluating new forms of professional development for teachers, even those that follow best practice, before theseinterventions are taken to scale.