Keywords

1 Introduction

There have been major reforms in all levels of education in Mongolia since the collapse of the socialist system in 1990. As the fundamental social value shifted to democratic and humanistic philosophy, education systems including curriculum, content, pedagogy and governance, needed to shift. UNESCO (2019) remarked on the great effort of teachers who had overcome the challenges of past decades and brought the education system up to date.

Education systems compare their quality of education and student achievement through international benchmarking studies such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Mongolia is planning to participate in PISA for the first time in 2022. Although Mongolia attended TIMSS in 2007, the achievement result was excluded from the comparison because of poor documentation of the samples and data. Accordingly, there is no data available about the education system in terms of student performance/achievement through international comparative studies. A recent study says teacher quality in Mongolia, in terms of policies and mechanisms, is higher than average than some other Asian countries (Chun & Gentile, 2020). Within the country, research on teaching quality and behaviour are scarce.

It is important to understand the contextual background of the quality of teachers and teaching in Mongolia. We pose the following research question and sub questions.

Research question: What is the contextual background for quality of teachers and teaching in Mongolia?

  • Sub research question 1: What are the teacher policies and challenges around them?

  • Sub research question 2: What are some curriculum related factors that guide teachers’ teaching skills and behaviour?

2 Policies and Challenges

In this section, the current system, including teacher related policies and mechanisms, from initial teacher preparation to entry to teaching profession, including professional development and related factors will be described.

2.1 Teacher Preparation

Primary and secondary education teacher training is offered as a four-year bachelor of education course of study. Graduates of secondary education teacher programs are qualified to teach both at lower (grade 6–9) and upper secondary (grade 10–12) level. Secondary education teachers of all subjects teach grades 6–12.

More than half of school and kindergarten teachers study for their qualifications at the Mongolian National University of Education. In 2020 it was recorded that 7.8% of the teachers hold a diploma education, 76% of the teachers hold a bachelor’s degree and 15.8% hold a master’s degree or above. The government policy aims to increase the percentage of teachers who hold master’s degrees to 70% by 2024, similarly to some developed countries such as Finland.

Criticism of teaching quality tends to focus on teacher education (Gore et al., 2001). Mongolia is not an exception. As this profession is regarded as a low paid profession in Mongolia, pre-service teacher candidates tend to have lower university entrance examination scores than the other specialisations. In 2013, the government started offering a scholarship to those with high university entrance examination scores who wished to pursue the teaching profession in order to encourage high calibre candidates. This program became a crucial measure for increasing the quality of candidates enrolling for pre-service courses (UNESCO, 2019). Although the idea was good and attracted many students, neither the ministry nor the university ensured that graduates would choose to enter to the teaching positions after graduation.

The current teacher standards were approved in 2010. These standards covered teacher training program curriculums, evaluations, duration, and requirements for learning environment. The teacher standards clearly stated the necessary competences and behaviors of the graduates of the teacher major. The standard also includes mandatory and elective courses and a minimum number of credits. However, the standard is not consistently implemented, and teacher training universities and programs lack a comprehensive policy and a consolidated curriculum. This leads to a system which produces a variety of teachers, including some who are poorly prepared and un-qualified.

It is important to consider that there is no official support system or induction program for novice teachers at school. This fact makes the quality of teacher training even more important. In a small survey, teachers answered that 88% of the their teaching knowledge was learnt in teacher training and 83% answered that the program was good or very good (Enkhtuvshin, 2020). For teacher training subject content, pedagogy and teaching practice are the most important elements for quality teacher preparation. 77% of the teachers answered that they were prepared well or very well.

2.2 Entry to the Profession

School principals hold the full authority to hire and allocate teachers in Mongolia. For new graduates, a Bachelor degree from a teacher education program is considered a teaching license.

Urban schools and local schools face different problems regarding hiring teachers. Once pre-service candidates attend a capital city for university, they like to stay in the city as teachers. Overall, well-educated, skilled and experienced primary and secondary education teachers, specifically Mathematics, English, Physics and ICT teachers are unwilling to work in rural areas where laboratories, teaching aids and other resources are in scarce supply (UNESCO, 2019). Rural schools are always in need of teachers. Some rural schools offer accommodation to attract new graduate or young teachers who are in need of financial support. The government also provides additional ‘local subsidy’ every five consecutive years to keep teachers at rural schools.

In 2014, a regulation was introduced that required new graduates to qualify to become novice teachers. However, the teacher qualification examination was withdrawn in 2018, because there was very low interest from candidates to enter the teaching profession in rural areas. Only around forty percent of the exam takers passed (UNESCO, 2019). The system was not equipped to verify the teachers’ ability to practice in the field (Kim et al., 2017). The researchers also found that the system was criticized for failing to guarantee conformity, fairness and transparency; however a policy review suggests that the teacher qualification examination should return from a legal standpoint (UNESCO, 2019).

Although teachers are guaranteed to life-long job and stable economic rewards as government officials, teachers’ social recognition is low in Mongolia.

2.3 Teacher Professional Development

2.3.1 National Level Professional Development

The Mongolian system of in-service teacher education was similar to that of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, when established in 1969 (Steiner-Khamsi, 2005). A prominent feature of the socialist system was “life-long learning” which included the right of each teacher and administrator to attend centrally organized teacher education sessions every five years.

Around 2000, the focus of national and donor-driven teacher quality reform activities were directed to improvements to the in-service teacher training system, leaving the pre-service system neglected and under-funded (ADB, 2008). In-service development programs needed to fill the gaps in knowledge and skills of teachers which should have been inculcated during pre-service teacher training. Needs-based, decentralized in-service teacher training was implemented through the ‘Voucher system’, adopted in 1998. It was intended to allow schools to choose the type of teacher training based on school and teacher needs (Pagma et al., 2002), but the practice was not effective. Teachers, school principals and provincial education authorities abused the vouchers for visiting the capital city (Steiner-Khamsi & Stolpe, 2006).

Shifted back to the centralized professional development system, a ministry-affiliated Institute for Teachers’ Professional Development (ITPD) was re-established in 2012 and offered centralized mandatory training to teachers in their first, fifth and tenth year of teaching. For some years the training functioned as an extension of their teaching license, but then was withdrawn. The focus of the training was ‘learning’, ‘collaborating’, and ‘sharing knowledge and experience’. All the expenses related to mandatory training are paid for by the government. Centralized training for 40 h consisted of 4 h of policy and legal training, 4 h personal development, 8 h of ICT skills, and 22 h of professional knowledge and metholodogy. The system provides teachers an equal opportunity to improve teachers’ knowledge, methodology and skills which is important in terms of equality.

2.3.2 Local and School Level Professional Development

The most recent regulation ‘Promoting teacher development law’ of 2018 encouraged the decentralization of teacher professional development. Even though the centralized training remained the same, to ensure equal opportunity for teachers and local units (provinces and districts in the capital level) schools were required to establish ‘Teacher development centers’ for teachers to develop their knowledge and skills sustainably on the job.

Even though local level education departments provide the teachers with opportunities to share their knowledge and experience, the practice varies depending on the initiatives of the officials in local education department. School level supervision is organized by subject-based teacher groups in secondary level and grade-based teacher groups in primary level. Teacher induction programs for novice teachers are very poor at schools.

The teacher promotion system is based on professional degrees: regular teacher, methodologist teacher, leading teacher, advisor teacher. Teachers are expected to aim to get the degree when the working year requirement was fulfilled because the promotion criteria was mainly based on working years up until 2018. With the new law of 2018, general requirements of student learning achievement, teacher professional and methodological skill, satisfaction of learners, teachers and peers, parents and caretakers, self-development have to be fulfilled in order to promote to a next degree.

2.3.3 Teacher Evaluation, Appraisal and Salary

Teachers who themselves, or whose students, successfully attend academic competitions were considered “good teachers” in the past. School evaluation and teacher evaluation both included criteria such as the preparation of students for national or international academic competitions such as International Mathematical Olympiad, their participation, and their performance. Competition achievement was tied with teacher performance and salary system. Teacher’s salary consisted of a base salary, supplement salary and bonuses. The base salary of teachers was solely based on a teacher’s experience. Supplement salary for teachers was introduced in Mongolia in 1995 (World Bank, 2006). Supplement salary was provided based on being a homeroom teacher, incentives for overtime, remuneration for teacher’s professional degree, taking charge of cabinet or laboratory, leading the subject teaching sector, remuneration for the skills, or remuneration for residing in rural areas.

When outcomes-based education was introduced to Mongolia in 2003, teacher salaries were tied to performance and teacher ‘outcome contract’ or scorecard as it was called. The teacher performance requirement included 10 criteria/indicators, only two of which were directly linked to students, class management and student development. Bonuses were four-time awards given once a year, based on evaluation by the school administration of the teacher performance.

Continuing to the current system, the education reform of 2012 emphasized “developing each and every student” and this changed the concept of a ‘skilled’ or ‘good’ teacher. Criticism that ‘teachers only focus on national competition promising students and ignore the rest’ changed the requirements. The current teacher evaluation system assesses teachers’ performance by five criteria which include: students’ academic achievement, character development, talent, health, and parents’ satisfaction. Quarterly incentive supplement bonuses are based on the result of both a teacher self-evaluation and an evaluation of the school principal or instructional manager based on the five criteria. In a recent study about school management, more than 70% of teachers answered teacher evaluation conducted by school management help teachers to improve their lesson (ADB, 2017). However, the common practice is that a school’s total amount for incentive supplement is divided equally across all teachers regardless of individual teachers’ performance. The salary supplements account for around 41% of a teacher’s income (UNESCO, 2019) so this is a critical issue. It should also be noted that the salary supplement received for teaching additional hours makes up the largest percentage of a teacher’s monthly income excluding the base salary.

As a mechanism for teachers to be recognized and rewarded for their teaching, the government is planning to introduce a performance-based salary system in the near future. Prior to this reform, the government has approved a new school self-monitoring and evaluation regulation in 2019 that includes evaluation rubrics with five domains to evaluate the school; one of these domains pertains to lesson management and quality, which is directly linked to teachers’ teaching behavior. The domain consists of 17 items which the school principal or education manager must monitor in order to evaluate teachers’ teaching through observations. It can be expected that the observations would be used as useful data for teacher professional development and improving their teaching in the classroom. Interestingly, some criteria of teachers’ teaching behavior included in the regulation look very similar to some “International Comparative Analysis of Teaching and Learning” (ICALT, will be explained in next section) items: 5 items to safe and stimulating educational climate, 3 items to clear and structured instruction, 1 items to teaching learning strategies, and 2 items to differentiating instruction.

The TALIS 2013 questionnaire reveals the job satisfaction of Mongolian teachers. With a 4-point rating scale, the average job satisfaction of teachers was 3.42 (Ulziisaikhan, 2017). Job satisfaction about work environment was 3.33. By working experience, teachers up to 5 years and over 21 years have the highest job satisfaction, which is the same as the TALIS-2013 result. The study showed that it was not a school related factor but the teacher-student relationship and teacher collaboration which was a positive factor in their job satisfaction.

3 Teachers’ Teaching Skill and Behavior

Questions arise about what the level of the actual teaching skill and behaviour is in the classroom. This section answers sub research question 2: What are some curriculum related factors that guide teachers’ teaching skill and behavior?

Although there are studies about quality of teaching of Mongolian teachers (Jadamba et al., 2014; Enkhtuvshin, 2014; Luvsandorj & Oyun-Erdene, 2015), none of this research includes actual teaching in classroom. In a study that measured and compared the effective teaching behavior of teachers of Mongolia and Korea (Chun et al., 2020), Korean teachers performed higher than Mongolian teachers, although with a small difference. The theoretical framework and tool called “International Comparative Analysis of Learning and Teaching (ICALT)” can be used to study effective teaching behaviour, which includes six domains. Safe and stimulating educational climate, Efficient classroom management, Clear and structured instruction, Intensive and activating teaching, Teaching learning strategies, and Differentiating instruction (van de Grift et al., 2014). ICALT tool measures teaching behaviour by these six domains through 35 items, using four ordinal response categories (1 = ‘mostly weak’ to 4 = ‘mostly strong’). Of these six domains, the first three domains refer to basic teaching skills, and the second three refer to advanced teaching skills.

The comparative analysis of the teaching quality of Mongolian and Korean secondary teachers using ICALT verified the tools and the feasibility of comparing teaching quality (Chun et al., 2020). Mongolian teachers were rated 3.20 in average in safe and stimulating educational climate domain, 3.03 in efficient classroom management domain, 2.95 in clear and structured instruction, and lower than 2.7 in all advanced teaching skill domains including the lowest, 2.41 in differentiating instruction domain (Chun et al., 2020).

We assumed that the teaching behaviors articulated in the ICALT observation tool align with the direction of educational reforms in Mongolia. And we investigated the following questions:

  • What are research findings and practices regarding teaching skill and behaviour?

  • How does the national curriculum guide teaching behaviour?

Mongolia has been implementing education reforms based on learning from international systems and experiences for the last three decades. As mentioned in the previous section, teachers who prepared and successfully sent their students to subject competitions were considered ‘good teachers’ in the socialist period and after that. A new government established in 2012 initiated a program “Upright Mongolian child” that brought primary and secondary education reform. A criticism at the time was that teachers had focused on strong students with potential and left behind the mass. The concept of “developing each and every child” led teachers to work in different ways. Subject competitions for primary education were prohibited and many schools stopped providing subject intensive programs that were targeted for competitions. Instead, more inclusive principles such as providing equal opportunities for every student, referring to students’ developmental differences, developing each student’s talent, interest and characteristics and lastly, equipping students with learning strategies were strongly required from schools and teachers. Educational goals and objectives integrated more twenty-first century skills and give more emphasis on learning skills in primary and secondary education.

In particular, the reform is aligned with teachers’ skill and behaviour as articulated in the advanced skills of ICALT tool, Differentiating instruction and Teaching learning strategies domains, and defines the teachers’ skill and behaviour in some extent.

3.1 Differentiating Instruction

Differentiating instruction in the classroom has been encouraged strongly for the last 10 years. Integrating differentiated instruction principles and practices and providing differentiated learning tasks according to students’ ability or learning levels in daily classroom practice was introduced through Mongolia-Cambridge Education Initiative, a curriculum reform prior to 2012-year reform. Formative assessment was also another new strategy systematically introduced to Mongolian teachers with the Mongolia-Cambridge Education Initiative.

An increasing humanistic view in society is also affecting education systems in Mongolia in terms of differentiation. The inclusive education agenda has regulated that up to one or two students with special needs can learn in each class. Teachers are expected to gain wider and deeper knowledge and methods of inclusive education including differentiated instruction. Inclusive education has become one of the mandatory programs in centralized in-service teacher training.

Differentiating instruction is a complex thing. Most teachers admit that they need professional development to devise differentiated activities for different level of learners and new strategies on classroom management (ADB, 2017). In research on the implementation of curriculum, 40% or more of teachers want more professional development training in the areas of how to teach the new curriculum, update their knowledge and understanding of their specialist field, improve their pedagogical skills, formative and summative assessment, classroom management and individualizing learning as well as catering to learners with special needs (ADB, 2017).

3.2 Teaching Learning Strategies

A major objective of the introduction of the new curriculum was to increase student learning outcomes through better learning strategies. The National core curriculum document not only shows the content area, but also provides the pedagogies for per subject through the learning objectives. For Mathematics and Social Science, the learning objectives are defined with in a problem-solving learning paradigm, for Science in inquiry-based learning, Mongolian language in Information processing and Design and technology in Project-based or product-based learning. Teachers need to acquire new skills and teaching expertise accordingly.

Moreover, along with the curriculum reform, Mongolia has adopted and adapted the student learning evaluation system from Japan (‘kantenbetsu’ evaluation system). Student learning evaluation system consists of three aspects that are knowledge and understanding, learning skill, and attitude.

However, a remaining problem is that teachers do not understand what the learning skills or learning strategies look like in the classroom. Not having themselves learnt in this way, they do not know how to teach in this way (ADB, 2017).

4 Conclusion and Discussion

In this chapter we explained the contextual background of teacher and teaching quality in Mongolia by reviewing the policies, some practices and challenges.

A recent study says teacher quality of Mongolia in terms of policies and mechanisms is above the average in Asian countries (Chun & Gentile, 2020) and our analysis does reveal some good policies. However, the policy coherence linking teacher preparation, teacher professional development, and teachers’ evaluation appears weak, and some policies are not being implemented sufficiently in all settings.

Teacher professional standards and government scholarship attract the best students into the teaching profession and there are good policies and practices in initial teacher preparation. However, policy implementation is ignored or not monitored by those who should be responsible.

Professional development systems have been changed several times in the last 10 years. The latest system increased the professional development opportunities for teachers at the local and school level, but support to teachers’ professional development on-the-job varies across schools, and support practices are often not leveraged because of inadequacies of school administrators’ leadership (MECSS & JICA, 2018).

An in-depth look at the policies suggests that there is a need for strengthening the alignment of teacher policies and the enforcement of implementation.

As Mongolia continues to struggle to find better policies for better teachers, the government approved a teacher reform program called the “Skilled teacher” at the beginning of 2021. This is a measure to improve pre-service education; provide continuous development of teachers through support for local schools to build professional learning groups; and to increase teacher salaries.

Education systems try to support teachers with training or assessment; instead, they should enhance practice focusing on teaching and development (Bowe & Gore, 2017). Policies and mechanisms such as teacher training or curriculum documentation are important. However, what is more important is what is happening in the “black box” of the classroom to show impact of students’ learning and achievement. Reforms of the past focused on teachers rather than on teaching. Now, monitoring of teaching and lesson quality through lesson observations, and introduction of performance-based salary system might influence teachers’ practice and behavior in a way that might lead to an improvement in students’ learning and achievement.