Distance teacher education for a better school Curriculum 2013
Udin S Winataputra and Riza Alrakhman
FKIP-Universitas Terbuka
Jakarta, Indonesia
It is generally accepted that teacher education should contribute to the improvement of education at the school level. This must also apply to Universitas Terbuka’s (UT) distance teacher education programmes which have the main mission of continually improving school teachers’ academic qualification and competencies. This is the time for UT to make a much better contribution to the Ministry of National Education and Culture’s (MONEC) national policies for developing and implementing Curriculum 2013. For school teachers to implement Curriculum 2013 successfully, teacher upgrading and teacher refresher courses are required which are in line with the real and urgent need for teachers’ professional development. It is in this context that the teacher education curriculum in UT has to be changed.
Analysis of the foundational ideas and principles applied in Curriculum 2013 was carried out through discussions with members of its core team, as well as senior staff in the UT Faculty of Teacher Education. This indicated strongly that there is an urgent need for UT to reposition its teacher education programme to adapt to the prospective needs of quality education in schools by strengthening the implementation of Curriculum 2013. The following activities are among those which are likely to fulfil UT’s teacher education roles:
| 1 | Mapping and assessing the congruence and contingency between the existing teacher education curriculum and related aspects of Curriculum 2013 |
| 2 | Deciding which of the teacher education curriculum components are really tied to substantive pedagogical and management dimension of Curriculum 2013 |
| 3 | Realigning and redeveloping necessary subjects, insructional processes, learning activities, the learning climate, learning assessment, and/or instructional management aspects |
| 4 | Developing online refresher and/or retraining programmes for tutors and teaching supervisors to improve the related tutorial modes and resources |
| 5 | Planning an evaluation for the realigned programmes for assessing their impact. |