Teacher Effectiveness - an Intervention on Bonding with Students

In poorer countries, an estimated 70% of children struggle to read for meaning. Available evidence indicates that classroom environment is a contributor to poor cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes (e.g. Carneiro et al. 2020 and 2022; Alan et al, 2024; Alan and Mumcu, 2024; WHO, 2021). Against this backdrop, we propose a particular intervention that we hypothesize improves teacher effectiveness. We posit that children are more likely to want to attend school and to be stimulated if they feel an emotional bond with the teacher. Our primary contribution is to evaluate an intervention designed to improve teachers’ willingness and ability to bond with students. The outcomes are a (holistic) suite of measures of the child’s cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes. The mechanisms are student attendance and study effort and indicators of teacher motivation and job satisfaction. Our second contribution is to randomize teachers into two treatment arms which differ in the way the teacher-student bond is achieved. One trial arm is a pure control and there are two treatment arms. In both treatment arms, we inform teachers that personalized interactions and bonding with children can motivate the child. One arm implements a “top down” treatment –workshops training teachers in the process of bonding, providing structured techniques derived from evidence- based programs e.g. Teachstone. The other is “bottom up” - having set the target (bonding), we incentivize teachers to find ways of achieving it. We propose to run the RCT across 200 primary schools in Bangladesh, where we have an MOU with the government.