Teaching Practices, Behavioral Change, and Socio-Emotional Skill Formation

Résumé

Schools shape skills that matter beyond academic achievement. Teachers are central to this process, yet whether these effects arise from fixed teacher attributes or from malleable instructional practices remains unclear. We investigate this question through a randomized intervention in Spanish secondary schools. The program equips treated teachers with tools to observe students' socio-emotional skills and provide structured feedback during routine instruction, thus generating exogenous variation in instructional practices. We combine external observations of student behavior with independent measures of teaching practices, survey measures of socio-emotional skills, and administrative records of grades and absences. The intervention improves observed behaviors among disadvantaged students and those with weaker baseline skills. Treated teachers shift instruction toward more interactive forms and reduce behavioral correction. For disadvantaged students, these behavioral gains reduce absenteeism but do not raise short-run grades, while more advantaged students experience modest grade improvements despite little observable behavioral change. These patterns reveal that instructional practices causally shape socio-emotional skill formation, with behavioral and academic margins responding asymmetrically across student populations.