Improving early literacy through teacher professional development: Experimental evidence from Colombia

Teachers are a fundamental input for classroom learning. Consequently, teacher development is a policy priority for governments around the world. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of “Let’s All Learn to Read,” a curricular reform implemented via a one-year professional development program that trained and coached first-grade teachers throughout the school year and provided them and their students with structured materials. Following a year of instruction by trained teachers, students’ literacy scores in treated schools grew by 0.39 of a standard deviation compared to students in the control group. These gains persisted after the intervention finished; through the second and third grades.