Measures of quality through classroom observation for the Sustainable Development Goals: lessons from low-and-middle-income countries

With the adoption of the United Nations General Assembly’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), global education agencies are grappling with how quality can and should be measured for global reporting purposes. Several factors at the education system, school, and classroom levels shape education quality, including the limited information available at the global level about what is happening in the classroom. Such information can only come through observation-based measures that record teacher practices, either through routine monitoring conducted by system actors or through surveys. Classroom observation is used extensively in not only teacher education and professional development, but also in evaluation studies. However, there are fewer cases where classroom observations are used for system monitoring purposes—particularly in low-and middle-income countries. This paper reviews what has been learned from observation instruments in low-and middle-income countries and what opportunities(i.e., scope) there are to systematize these countries to that they can monitor quality at both the school and system levels.