The Professionality of a Teacher

by

Ginanjar Masyhur

According to The Constitution for Teachers and Lecturers article 1 point (1) “Teacher is a professional educator...”. It is important for teachers to be professional while doing their job. The need of professional teachers is rising because this country needs competent teachers to teach students on how to become creative and competent students. The need of professionality is none other than to create the best way possible on how to teach and educate students into their full potentials. As quoted from a Journal by Sutarmanto (2009:20), “Teacher professionalism needs to improve based on the improvements of science, technology, and community needs, that includes the needs of high quality human resources, and have the capability to compete inside regional, national, or even international forums.”. Knowing this, teachers must also derived from high quality human resources to also compete with the improvement of the world. For instance a teacher must understand the development of technologies around them. A teacher must use proper ways to teach, that includes the use of technologies in teaching, and maximize the effort to make the subject more understandable to the students.

According to Gaffar in his Journal titled “Mimbar Pendidikan” (1998:4), it is stated that “... teachers holds a strategic role especially in creating the characteristics of the nation through improvements of personality and desired values,” The need of changes in students’ behavior and personality to build better characteristics of a nation is very important. Teachers’ role is actually to shape students to become more aware of the world, and can compete in 21st century. To create the better generation that can bring the nation pride and be the leaders of future generations to come. And to do that, teachers need to be professionalized by a professionalization program, according to Caplow in Peter Javis (1983:21), “... the activity (Teacher Professionalization) is followed by improvements of training facilities, qualifications, and profession requirements,”. With that in mind, teacher professionalization aims the best to qualify the participants and filter them to be enrolled in the professional world of teaching.

Teaching can be a difficult challenge for a professional teacher, even though they are trained to adapt in any situation regardless of where they are teaching. According to the theory of teaching and training, there are two determining factors that affects the education itself: software and hardware. Software here means curriculum, education and training organisation, rules, teaching methods, or the teachers themselves; meanwhile the Hardware here includes facilities, like the building, library, laboratorium, etc. This is according to Sugiarta (2012:355). So even though the teachers themselves is a skilled educators, or in this case professional educators, they are still facing the same challenge as everyone, the two factors mentioned above. Because if they want to be called professional, they must have access to those facilities. If the facilities or one of the two factors above is not supportive enough, the teaching process can be disrupted, and can’t reach the goal of the teachers themselves.

So in conclusion, a teacher must be professional in doing their job in shaping the students into leaders of the next generation to come, and to achieve that, the professionalization program is executed in order to create the best teacher possible. But also there are some factors that can affect teaching methods of a teacher. For instance facilities, an effective teaching can not be executed if the facilities is not supportive.

References

UU RI No. 14 tahun 2005 tentang Guru dan Dosen

Sutarmanto, Kompetensi dan Profesionalisme Guru Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini, Jurnal Visi Ilmu Pendidikan, 2009, hal. 20

Gaffar, F.G., “Menghargai Pengabdian Para Guru”. Dalam Mimbar Pendidikan, Jurnal Pendidikan (3, XVII), 1998

C. Rudy Prihantoro, Sertifikasi sebagai Sarana Peningkatan Profesionalisme Guru dalam Peningkatan Mutu Pendidikan, APEKTINDO, 2010, hal. 181

Sugiarta. “Pengaruh Sikap Guru terhadap Pekerjaan dan Pengalaman Pendidikan dan Pelatihan terhadap Kompetensi Profesional Guru Olahraga SMPN se-Kabupaten Jepara”, JMP, 2012, Volume 1 Nomor 3, hal.355