it is notoriously difficult to change teaching practices, and most interventions fail unless they are designed well and targeted properly.

China, like other countries, is working to improve its teacher training programs, investing millions of dollars in professional development. Yet a recent study by the Stanford Rural Education Action Program found that, while teachers in rural China gained knowledge from their training, teachers did not subsequently change their teaching behaviors, leading to no significant improvement in student outcomes (Lu et al. 2017). To address such challenges, one promising avenue is to have professional development programs accompanied by classroom observations and feedback. A special type of observation is one not done directly in the classroom, but on a deferred basis, based on records of practices that have sufficient detail to allow coding (or rating) of recorded behaviors, for instance with video recordings (Martínez-Rizo 2012).

There is growing interest in observing teaching practices, for formative feedback to teachers, teacher performance evaluation and incentives, program impact evaluation, and research on the determinants of student learning (Bruns 2016). Tools have evolved over time. Many early versions tended to take the form of checklists (whether a teacher used certain techniques, whether work of children was displayed on the wall, etc.). More detailed instruments, such as the “Stallings Classroom Snapshot” instrument, developed by Professor Stallings in the 1970s, captured low-inference measures on amounts of time spent on specific activities (e.g. proportion of classroom time spent on group work), frequencies (e.g. number of questions asked by the teacher), and other general observations (e.g. proportion of students engaged in the activity at specific points in the lesson). These forms of observation provided a useful picture of what was taking place in the classroom and allowed analysts to infer certain levels of quality in teaching-learning, but little was directly measured on the teaching-learning process.

A more recent generation of instruments aims to measure the quality of what takes place in the classroom. These instruments are based on current theories on the issues to observe and are more sophisticated in dealing with psychometric properties (Martínez-Rizo 2012). These instruments tend to use scales and be based on rubrics that define a range of quality from low to high. Many of these instruments have been developed in the United States. The most prominent of these are CLASS itself, developed by Robert Pianta and colleagues, and the Framework for Teaching, developed by Charlotte Danielson.

Some instruments were developed expressly for developing countries, such as Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPSS); and for specific subjects, such as the Protocol for Teaching Language Arts Observation (PLATO), Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI), and Quality of Science Teaching (QST).

For this pilot study CLASS was chosen because it has proven to be one of the most valid and reliable lesson observation instruments and there is consistent evidence that its measures have a strong relationship with student learning outcomes.

# **2.2 Methodology**

Data collection for this pilot study took place between December 2016 and January 2017. This study is based on a purposive sample of the three pilot counties. Each pilot county had four schools observed, and each school provided three teachers for observation. Among the four schools, two were elementary schools and two junior secondary schools, one of each rural (“out of township”) and one of each urban (“in township”) (table 2).

Classroom observations were conducted in primary and junior secondary schools. Raters assessed the 36 teachers of English, Mathematics, and Chinese in their regular classrooms. Thirty teachers were videotaped, some of who were also observed live, while six had live-only evaluations. The teachers were a mix of 4<sup>th</sup> and 8<sup>th</sup> grade teachers. At each school, county officials were asked to identify three types of teachers: those who were “new to teaching” (had less than three years of experience—but see endnote 4); those who had been designated “backbone teachers;” and those who had been identified as potential backbone teachers— 2