Transforming Teachers
Teachers are the key to educational transformation. Ironically, after 75 years of Indonesian independence, the goverment does not yet have a grand design for systematic, effective, and sustainable teacher development.
243/5000 1st grade students of SD Negeri Cipadu 03 take lessons at the house of a student in the Pondok Aren area, South Tangerang, Tuesday (1/9/2020). This learning activity was carried out for the first time because of the teacher\'s visit to the student\'s house.
Teachers are the key to educational transformation. Ironically, after 75 years of Indonesian independence, the Education and Culture Ministry does not yet have a grand design for systematic, effective, and sustainable teacher development.
An outstanding visionary teacher development design is indispensable. The current teacher development policy is not systematic because it has not comprehensively integrated the education and development of teachers from upstream to downstream into a solid system. Teacher development programs respond more to short-term needs through piloting programs that are specific (elitist) and do not simultaneously empower the majority of teachers who are in equal and fair positions.
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A comprehensive teacher development design should integrate three domains synergistically: education, selection, and profession development. Education is related to the existence of the Institute for Educators and Education Personnel (LPTK) as an institution for forming and providing teacher candidates. Selection is a policy to determine the criteria for the best teachers who are allowed to teach in class. Profession development is further education when the teacher has become an educator so that he can develop himself continuously according to the career stages he can choose from.
Three root problems in teacher development have posed a challenge. First, the transformation of the LPTK as a place of education and the formation of prospective teachers. Currently there are more than 400 LPTK institutions. Apart from being too many, the quality of the LPTKs is also questionable. There are disparities in the quality of public and private LPTKs, Java and outside Java.
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N Suhendra (53), a grade III teacher at SDN Pondok Petir 2, Bojongsari, Depok, West Java, teaches his students face-to-face on the terraces of students\' houses, Monday (31/8/2020).
The teacher certification policy, which provides an allowance of one salary, has made the interest of young people to become teachers very high. As a result, students to become teachers have gotten bigger. Currently there are more than 1 million students to become teachers. This condition has a bad impact. The excess of students to become teachers has the potential to increase the number of educated unemployment because the demand and supply of teachers is not balanced. The LPTK curriculum is also considered less relevant to the dynamics of changing times and to pursue advances in technology, information, and communication as part of the learning process. The latest neuroscience-based pedagogies that can help teachers understand the learning process have not been widely introduced in the LPTKs. The portion of teaching practice as an important part of the teaching process is also small.
Second, the challenge of selecting the best teachers. Every year there are civil servant teachers who retire. In the next five years, approximately 185,000 elementary, junior high school (about 60,000), senior high school (about 23,000) and vocational school (around 12,000) teachers will retire. All of these need to be prepared through an objective, meritocratic, and competitive selection system because this is an opportunity to select the best teachers.
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The need to select the best teachers is overshadowed by the existence of contract teachers who have made great contributions to education over the years, who also have the right to become civil servants. Of the 400,000 K2 contract teachers, only around 52,000 passed the selection of government employees with work agreements (PPPK) in early February 2019. This means that there are quality problems among the contract teachers. However, even the teachers who have passed the PPPK selection are still in limbo because they are constrained by regulations that must be completed by the government. Selecting the best teachers will be the key to important changes in the future.
Third, currently there are 3.3 million teachers, of whom 1.3 million are not certified. Certified early childhood education (PAUD) and SMK vocational school teachers is only 30 percent. The others are only about 45 percent. The 2018 education quality mapping (PMP) score shows that the lowest score at all levels is the standard of educators and education personnel with a score below 4 out of 7 scores. So, the real big problem lies in the transformation of the teachers who are already in this position. Many of them, even when they retire, never receive training.
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Stevin Melay, dosen pada Fakultas Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan Universitas Pattimura Ambon membentuk Gerakan Mengajar Covid-19 di Pulau Seram, Maluku.
Radical transformation
If compared to a river flow, the current teacher flow in the quality of the teaching river is not yet satisfactory. If they are not touched, national education will experience a bleak period until they enter retirement. This condition needs to be radically transformed through a systematic, structured and effective approach.
The pattern of teacher profession education (PPG) entrusted to the LPTKs has so far proven not very effective. PPG only gives legitimacy to a profession certificate to obtain allowances, but in fact it is not able to significantly increase the quality. The size of the budget for certification allowances is getting bigger and bigger, thereby increasingly being burdensome for the state budget. As a result, the PPG quota is not regulated with seriousness to resolve the remaining teachers who are not certified.
Frankly speaking. Half of our teachers are left stranded waiting for the PPG quota in order to obtain certification allowances due to budget constraints. There are about 1.3 million teachers who become victims of injustice. They also teach more than 24 hours, being full of dedication, and some may provide quality teaching, but they are not eligible for certification allowances not because of their own faults. The teacher certification policy further divides the solidity of teachers, creates various kinds of inequality and social jealousy, and makes them victims of injustice in state policies.
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Nadiem Makarim tried to overcome the weaknesses of PPG by tightening the PPG selection process, designing it with a new approach, and launching the Mobilizing Organization Program (POP) as an expansion of teacher training resources outside the LPTKs. However, this policy has not yet synergized the roles of universities, mobilizing organizations, mobilizing schools, and mobilizing teachers as motors of change. POP and mobilizing teachers are not designed as a systematic, planned, and objective teacher development. POP is not systematic because its form is a program so that it is not integrated with the LPTKs as a system. It is not planned because the focus is on exploring existing innovations and good practices and then accommodating it for limited dissemination.
POP is also less objective because dimensions of teacher development to be achieved is also not clear. The standards of success will only be tested in the final assessment of students. In fact, there are many determining factors for the success of students and cannot be addressed solely to certain teachers who have been touched by the teacher development program through POP. Moreover, POP only targets the conditions of teachers who are already in the teaching process. This, too, is very limited in number.
A teacher teaches students of the Kria Tekstil Department of SMK Negeri 12 Surabaya, East Java, Wednesday (2/9/2020). The art vocational high school again organized face-to-face schools and implemented a rotating school system for its students.
The government must have a commitment to improve the lives of teachers and pay fair attention to their sustainable profession development.
Mobilizing elitism
The Independent Learning Policy of Nadiem Makarim through the mobilizing teacher program is actually not much different from the old teacher development model. In its process, this program will attract only a few teachers. What is somewhat different is the selection process, but the result will remain the same, namely a group of mobilizing elites, consisting of old faces of active and developing teachers who have received training privileges plus several new faces.
The concept of mobilizing teachers continues the tradition of elitism in old teacher training through short-term pilot programs. Meanwhile, most of the teachers, even those who have retired, have never been touched by the training and teacher development held by the government. In fact, they are the ones who need to be prioritized for development. The grand design of teacher development must be placed in the context of these complex challenges.
POP fever, mixed with accompanying political ingredients, will only bring us to a commotion. The government\'s commitment to strengthening the role of the LPTKs and transforming institutions will be a source of producing a reliable teacher candidates that are needed. More than that, the government must have a commitment to improve the lives of teachers and pay fair attention to their sustainable profession development.
Doni Koesoema A
In the document of 2020-2024 Strategic Plan of the Education and Culture Ministry, I have not seen these three basic issues to be elaborated well. The public expects Nadiem to work on target, not just have discussion and creating a commotion. We need a grand design for teacher development in a comprehensive, systematic and sustainable manner.
Doni Koesoema A, Lecturer at the Multimedia Nusantara University, Serpong.
