JP/Dhoni Setiawan

Educational technology will be for naught in supporting quality learning unless the professional development of teachers is taken into account.

High-quality teaching, coupled with good supporting facilities and resources, without doubt has a beneficial effect on both teaching itself and student learning—the desired goal of any level of education. Thus, one of the central strategies to achieving this goal is to boost teachers’ professionalism in teaching.

Attending teacher training, workshops in teaching and assessment, conferences, as well as pursuing further studies are several paths teachers can take to improve their dexterity in teaching. Through these pedagogic endeavors, teachers will be able to gain the mastery of content knowledge, to enrich their teaching experience, interpersonal and pedagogic skills, and to increase their overall academic ability.

It has been evident from research findings that these qualities contribute immensely to positive learning outcomes and to higher student achievement. Further, the effect of quality teaching and quality teachers significantly surpasses other factors such as the availability of teaching resources, students’ ethnicity, students’ economic background and schools attended by students.

In fact, with the abovementioned qualities teachers can play their roles to the fullest in improving the quality of student learning. Solid content knowledge, for example, is of a great assistance for teachers in enriching and broadening student perspectives.

Equipped with a wealth of perspectives, students can see and then assess things not from a single or narrow angle, but form a diverse vantage point of views.

Vast experience in teaching enables teachers to diagnose learning difficulties and to offer solutions to these quandaries, thus helping weaker students to accomplish desired learning outcomes. Also, experienced teachers can easily and flexibly adjust their teaching methods to learners who have different learning styles, and create an environment conducive to learning. By contrast, inexperienced teachers, as several studies have suggested, pose a hindrance to student achievement. School dropouts have also been imputed partly to teachers’ lack of experience and training.

Interpersonal skills have been found to significantly contribute to the way teachers build relationships with their students, and in turn to their academic success. Learning is a complex process, for it involves a multitude of individual differences, which greatly affect the ways students achieve instructional goals. Learning styles, ambiguity tolerance, sexes, background knowledge, and student’s familiarity with certain teaching methods and educational resources are some of these differences. So to speak, learning goes beyond cognition, and hence interpersonal skills are needed to effectively deal with these differences.

Apparently, affective factors such as empathy, care, patience, willingness to listen to do play a role in determining student achievement. A student who builds a constructive rapport with his teacher is highly likely to perform well in school and a teacher who shows empathy and care to their students inculcates the students with positive character building.

In addition, with the pedagogic skills they have, coupled with years of teaching experience, teachers can not only employ, but also evaluate various teaching approaches and methods by virtue of the diverse needs of their students, the degree of proficiency, and the suitability of those approaches and method to students’ learning context. Further, they can creatively discover their own teaching methods, provided that the employment of the available ones does a disservice to the students.

Finally, teachers’ overall academic ability has been cited as the consistent factor in determining quality learning. Students’ increased test scores have been attributed to teachers’ academic ability and their development in literacy is also due to this factor.

While the overriding concerns over today’s education system seem to have been the alteration of the curricula and the inclusion of educational technology, the professional development of teachers should not be overlooked.

The government’s educational program to certify teachers from all levels of education needs to be applauded. Admittedly, this well-intentioned effort is intended to enhance teachers’ professional development. Yet, such an educational intent should not be restricted to the competence test alone—one kind of assessment that measures teachers’ cognitive factors to the exclusion of other equal qualities such as teaching experience, as well as interpersonal and pedagogic skills.

The competence test program needs to be followed-up by a program that can comprehensively measure those equally important qualities missing in the teacher competence test.
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The writer teaches in the Faculty of Education and Language of Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta. He can be reached at setiono.sugiharto@gmail.com.

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