# **1 INTRODUCTION**

China has made huge strides in human development in the past three decades. Going forward, a key government priority is ensuring equality of quantity and quality of education. As student learning is dependent on teacher quality, school systems must ensure that their teachers receive systematic and targeted training to support effective teaching practices.

A basic challenge in ensuring teacher quality is lack of agreement on how to consistently measure instructional quality and teaching practices in the classroom. In Guangdong, teachers are often observed by other local teachers, the department heads of their schools, or by school administrators. These observations, however, are more subject to personal teaching style than any type of official best practices, and are often described as a checklist focused on a small range of behaviors. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to measure teaching quality in any standardized or comparable way, or to address shared shortcomings in teaching quality by education officials.

The work described in this pilot study was undertaken with three objectives in mind. The first was to assess whether, and to what extent, an internationally validated measure of teaching practices can be applied to Chinese classrooms. The second was to gain an understanding of the process involved in using direct classroom observation as a means of assessing teaching practices. This was needed not only for this pilot study but also for longer-term monitoring and evaluation that will be conducted under a loan from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to the People’s Republic of China for the proposed Guangdong Compulsory Education project. The third was to assess whether the information collected through classroom observation can be used to provide feedback to training providers, with a view to developing a results-based financing mechanism for improving teacher training.

Given these three objectives, our key research questions focus on the results of classroom observations and responses to teacher beliefs surveys.

1. Can such a tool be used to measure the strengths and weaknesses of teaching practices in the Chinese context, and if so, what do teaching practices in a selection of Guangdong schools look like?

2. Do these teaching practices vary across key characteristics such as geography, school type or teacher type?

3. What is the relationship between teacher beliefs and teaching practices?

This study applies the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS)—a classroom observation tool that measures 12 dimensions of teaching on a scale of 1–7.<sup>1</sup> In this study, information is also collected on teacher backgrounds and teacher beliefs.

## **1.1 Background**

To decide on the appropriate instrument for this pilot study, three approaches to classroom observation were considered: the Stallings Method, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) video study coding method, and the CLASS instrument (see section 3.1). A small-scale field test was conducted to assess the feasibility of the three approaches (from November to December 2015). Based on the findings of this field test and a review of the literature, the CLASS tool was selected for this study. This is backed up by the findings of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, a three-year study across seven US public school districts designed to determine how best to identify and promote great teaching. The research from the MET project identified teacher assessments with the use of observation tools as

> 1 CLASS was developed by researchers at the University of Virginia; CLASS observation training is now administered and developed by Teachstone.

2