Effective teaching in Mongolia: Policies, practices and challenges

Abstract

This chapter describes the contextual background of teacher and teaching quality in Mongolia through exploring teacher policies, and practices and challenges surrounding the teacher, followed by how curriculum sets the parameters for teaching behaviour. Students must finish a four-year teacher education program in Mongolia to become teachers. The government policy aims to increase the percentage of teachers who hold master's degrees up to 70% by 2024; 15.8% of primary and secondary education teachers held a master's degree as of 2020. The government requires teachers to attend mandatory training in their first, fifth and tenth teaching year. Besides these centralized trainings, the government is also reinforcing teachers' professional development policies in the direction that supports and encourages local and school-based professional development based on teachers' learning needs. Recently there has been a regulation of school self-monitoring and evaluation, including setting criteria on lesson management and quality to use for evaluation of teachers' teaching skills and behaviour, via lesson observations. Teacher behaviour and pedagogical methods are articulated in the curriculum documents as well. The most recent education reform was aimed at a principle that is called the change of 'Each and every child'. This was followed by curriculum revision with key concepts of inquiry-based learning, differentiating teaching (based on students' developmental differences) and assessment of progress and learning skills. These changes, needless to say, require teachers to improve their pedagogical skills. Research shows that Mongolian teachers still have difficulty with devising differentiated activities for students at different levels of learning. In terms of context, it should be understood that teaching is regarded as a low paid profession in Mongolia. The government takes measures such as: offering scholarships to attract good students into teaching profession; and providing salary supplements and local subsidies.