Reforming Teachers to Be Problem Solvers, Not Followers

Abstraksi

Large number of teacher training have been conducted by governments or private institutions across provinces in Indonesia to improve teachers’ professionalism. Various teaching strategies, learning models and teaching aids have been introduced to teachers during the training to inspire them in designing more joyful and meaningful classroom learning. On one hand, it broadens teachers ‘perspectives. On the other hand, teachers tend to be followers of what they have been taught in the training without knowing the rationale. Consequently, they will go back to their old way of teaching in the next few months. Hence, INOVASI, a partnership program between Australia (DFAT) and Indonesia (MoEC) tried to shift the notion of training the teachers to facilitating the teachers through one of their pilots. We facilitated the teachers to come up with their own solution that is best-fit to their students’ needs through the cyclic process of identifying students’ learning difficulties, planning the action, implementing experimental actions to solve the identified learning difficulties, reflecting whether it improves students’ learning and re-planning the actions. The pilot is still on-going in NTB and NTT. Hence, the data were still from regular monitoring and evaluation assessments. But, the current analyzed data have shown that teachers have been successfully identified students’ learning difficulties, developed and implemented best-fit action plan, and improved students’ learning outcomes on particular basic competencies. The process has encouraged them to focus more on the learning that is taking place in their classroom and how to keep improving their teaching practices.