A copy of the programme is available here. Registration has now closed.

The School of Economics is excited to announce registration is now open for ‘Characterising Effective Teaching.’ The conference will take place virtually on Tuesday October 5th, 3pm to 6:15pm BST (10am to 1:15pm EST).

Teachers are the most important factor in a child’s learning, outside the family. This finding has been reinforced for many people through the experience of school closures in the pandemic: teaching a child is not easy! In this conference we present new evidence on the craft of teaching: how teachers can learn from each other, and how the way that teachers teach matters for their students.

This work has been generously funded by the Nuffield Foundation, and has been carried out by Shenila Rawal of OPERA, Eric Taylor of Harvard, and Simon Burgess of the University of Bristol.

Programme

15:00  Welcome

15:05  Session 1: Teachers teaching (Chair: Eric Taylor)

• Simon Burgess (University of Bristol): “Teacher Peer Observation and Student Test Scores: Evidence from a Field Experiment in English Secondary Schools”
• Gill Wyness (UCL): “Who teaches the teachers? A RCT of peer-to-peer observation and feedback in 181 schools”
• Julie Cohen (University of Virginia): “Mixed Reality Simulations in Teacher Education: Experiments to Understand and Improve Teacher Quality”

Each talk will last 15 minutes, with 15 minutes of questions at the end

16:10   Session 2: Teachers learning (Chair: Simon Burgess)

• Eric Taylor (Harvard University): “Characterizing effective teaching: Evidence from linking classroom observations and student achievement scores”
• Shenila Rawal (OPERA): “Characterizing effective teaching: Comparing the evidence with sector views”
• Harry Fletcher Wood (Associate Dean, Ambition Institute): “Helping teachers to teach better: what and how?”

Each talk will last 15 minutes, with 15 minutes of questions at the end

17:15   Session 3: What should teachers do? (Chair: Shenila Rawal)

• Amy Finch (Head of Strategic Evaluation, Ofsted)
• Catherine Scutt (Director of Education and Research, Chartered College of Teaching)
• Frances Blurton (Assistant Director, Developing Teachers and Leaders Division, UK Department for Education)

Each talk will last 15 minutes, with 15 minutes of questions at the end

18:15 Close