Teacher Quality Improvement Program: Empowering Teachers to Increasing a Quality of Indonesian's Education

AbstractTeacher Quality Improvement (TQI) program has been designed to improve teacher competencies to make classroom climate fun and conducive for students to learn. The training program consists of three modules of competencies, namely personality, social, and pedagogy. The duration is two weeks, one week for personality and social competencies, and one week for pedagogy competency. All training modules basically aim at developing teachers’ soft skills to enable them to teach students effectively through creating fun and innovative climate.The purpose of this study is to assess the impacts of TQI program on the perception of headmasters, teachers and students toward the way teachers running the classroom before and after joining the program. It is hypothesized that the program has influenced positively teachers’ perception about the change in the way they have to teach their students. Teachers perceive their competencies in teaching improved significantly after joining the program. Similarly, students also perceive the way their teachers teach them much better after their teachers receive competency training through the program. Meanwhile, the perception of the headmasters toward teachers’ competencies is not significantly different before and after participating in the program.Sixty-three school headmasters, sixty-three teachers having participated in TQI program, and 189 students are the respondents of this study. A questionnaire is used to collect data concerning the perception of the teachers and headmasters, while data from the students are collected using guided interview done by research assistants. For the purpose of analysis, the data collected from three students are summed up into one score. Therefore, there are 63 school headmasters, 63 teachers and 63 groups of students.The data is analyzed using two-way mixed model analysis of variance with pre-post for similar groups, and three different groups. The results show that there are significant interaction effects. Teachers evaluate their own behaviors much more in positive way after joining the TQI program compared to before joining the program (p<0.001). Similarly, the students evaluate the behaviors of their teachers much higher after their teacher join the Program compared to the evaluation before joining the training (p