TEACHERS’ CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN 21ST CENTURY

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ABSTRACT

The 2030 Global Education requires that 21 st century teachers should possess
Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) in order to be considered as
qualified professional teachers. However, teachers have shown some form of hesitation in
embracing TPACK, especially toward the aspect of Information Communication
Technology (ICT) due their own comfort of using the old belief as well as hesitation in
learning to use the new technologies. Continuous Professional Development (CPD)
program is created in order to ensure that teachers keep themselves improving by
studying the recent trends in education world. CPD comes in a lot of form such as
workshops, formal courses, peer communication, and action research. CPD should be
encouraged to invite every teacher to join the program through the support of both the
institution and government to maintain the quality of the teachers. To ensure that teachers
participating in the CPD program, the program should be rewarding toward the teachers
to stimulate their interest and to open their awareness toward the importance of CPD.

Keywords: CPD, 21st Century Teacher, Teacher Professionality

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 TEACHERS’ CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN
21ST CENTURY

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A. Introduction
In 21st century, education is demanded to evolve following the changes in order to
find way of effective teaching to the 21st century students. Teachers are asked to implement
ICT (Information Communication Technology), in which to successfully implement ICT in
education, teachers of 21st century are asked to embrace TPACK (Technological Pedagogical
Content Knowledge). In Indonesia, Permendiknas No. 16 of 2007 regarding Teacher
competence and academic qualification standards demands that English teachers should be at
least a Bachelor (Undergraduate) and have pedagogical competence, social competence,
character competence, and professional competence. However, teachers are known to be
hesitant to follow the recent innovations in the evolution of knowledge due to several reasons
such as lack of the recent knowledge and constrains in individual efforts (Ertmer &
Ottenbreit-Leftwich, 2010). In order to combat this hesitation, teachers’ professional
development is one of the ways to respond to the changes in teaching and learning process.
Mohammadi and Moradi (2017) state that teachers’ professional development is emphasized
on both potential and sustainable development which encourages the teachers to be learners,
researchers, and significant others toward their students as reflection media. Professional
development may change teachers’ knowledge, self-efficacy, pedagogical belief, and culture
toward teaching and learning process (Ertmer & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, 2010). However, some
teachers, especially the senior ones are prone to reluctance of embracing the innovations due
to reasons such as lack of knowledge and constrains in effort.
Continuous professional development (CPD) is one of the ways that ensures teachers'
professional development as well as to prevent reluctance toward innovations. CPD is a
planned, continuous and lifelong process whereby teachers try to develop their personal and
professional qualities, and to improve their knowledge, skills and practice, leading to their
empowerment, the improvement of their agency and the development of their organization
and their pupils (Padwad and Dixit, 2011). Johnson (2009) states that there are a lot of ways
to keep CPD going, such as F2F workshops, online communities, reading activity, action
research, writing, formal course, and some other ways, in which it would be beneficial should
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the activities are combined into a planned, interlinked program followed by monitoring and
evaluation. CPD functions as a way for the education institution to break from the old habit
of hierarchical organization of school that is focused on top-down structure.

B. 21st Century Teacher

Students of the 21st century have technology as part of their life and as one of the
aspects integrated into their education environment aside from the pedagogical, social, and
psychomotoric aspects. This means that teachers of 21st century possess a new challenge
which is integrating technology in teaching and learning process in order to become
professional teachers according to the 2030 Global Education in which teachers are
encouraged to possess TPACK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge). 21st
century teachers have to be able to integrate technologies not only in learning and teaching,
but also planning, administration, assessing, and reporting (Becta, 2010).
Jan (2017) explains that there are several characteristics of teachers of 21st century.
Those characteristics are:
1. Using learner-centered classroom and personalized instructions;
2. Encouraging students as producers;
3. Using project-based learning;
4. Learning new technologies;
5. Going global;
6. Going digital;
7. Collaborating; and
8. Continuing development.
The characteristics show that teachers are hoped to cope up with technology revolution and
changing values of the students. Aside from that, the teachers are also asked to continuously
be active in joining professional development to increase their competence as the step to
activate the continuous professional development mindset.

C. Continuous Professional Development for Teacher of 21st Century

As explained before, CPD is a planned lifelong process that should be done by
teachers in order to ensure development toward becoming professional teachers. There are
two key principles that form the framework of CPD (Ministry of Social and Family
Development, 2013). Those principles are:

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 1. Individual and centre commitment to improve and learn; and,
2. CPD opportunities include both formal and informal training and development
activities.
The two principles show that CPD can be done in any form of activities that
encourages improvement and learning. The activities include professional training, discussion
with experts and peers, and doing research to name some of them that is done by teachers
during their career. However, in order to ensure that those activities be effective in improving
the professionality of 21st century teachers, the CPD activities should be directly relevant to
the participants, should have clearly identified intended outcomes, should take previous
knowledge and expertise into account, should model effective teaching and learning
strategies, and should have planned impact evaluation.

D. Stimulating Teacher’s Interest and Opening Their Awareness of CPD

CPD for the 21st century teachers is recommended to be intensive toward the
improvement of 21st century skills instruction. For example, the professional development
program should focus on training the teachers to integrate critical thinking in the context of
their specific subjects, such as in learning English language by using ICT integrated
literature. Furthermore, the development programs should encourage teachers to integrate the
21st century skills into the teaching standards of the teachers as well as open the mind of
teachers to have initiatives in improving themselves (Partnership for 21st Century Skills,
2009).
Partnership for 21st Century Skills (2009) explains that as 21st century teachers need a
stronger focus on ICT, CPD should also invest in ICT excellence in order to ensure teachers’
literacy toward the recent technologies that can be used to in teaching and learning. ICT
focuses toward the combination of communication and technology which means that teachers
of 21st century must be able to be involved in a kind of online support communities created
by either the institution of the teachers or the government in order to work on the teachers’
technology literacy as well as their interpersonal skills.
CPD, as a program designed to improve the professionality, is recommended to be
equally rewarding to the teachers in order to create a sense of achievement in the teachers
(Sujianto, Mukhadis, and Isnandar, 2012). Awarding the teachers via certification is one of
the methods that can be given by the institution, as well as some other, more personalized
awards. Aside from giving awards, providing the teachers with thorough evaluation process

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in the form of appraisal which include observation, interviews, portfolio, and testing by
experts is needed in order to give meaningful feedbacks to the teachers, to stimulate the
institution to do regular appraisal toward the teachers, and to help teachers to build peer
evaluation skills by noting the way the experts appraise (OECD, 2013).

E. Conclusion
To conclude, 21st century teachers should participate in CPD in order to increase their
professionality value, in which the 2030 Global Education dictates that teachers should
possess TPACK to be qualified according to the standards set by the world. CPD program
should also be rewarding to increase the teachers interest in joining the program, which in
turn open their awareness toward the importance of CPD to their professionality.

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