The Practice of Lesson Study in Indonesia: A Brief Overview

The development of education is inseparable with the development of teachers’ quality and professionalism.  Today in Indonesia, teachers face so many complexities. For example, the government has been setting up national examination minimal scores for elementary, junior lower, and junior high school students.  However, it seems that the school institutions are still underprepared.  Most of the teachers feel that the minimum scores is very unlikely to be achieved, except for the public schools in urban areas or specific provinces in Java,  or some private reputable schools. Other education experts consider that it is unfair to use the national examination to measure students achievement, since national examination only measure students by their mathematics, science  English and Bahasa scores only.

Despite the controversy, the TIMSS results show that Indonesian elementary and junior lower education is steadily downturning: for the last five years, Indonesia’s position has never been better than 10 lowest scored countries.  This of course is a very big challenge, for those students determine the future of the nation.

One of the governments’ strategies to face the challenge is by promoting a continuous professional development for teachers.  And one of approach used in this continuous professional development is lesson study.  Started in 3 districts, lesson study has been attracting growing interest not only for teachers but also among education stakeholders.  Today, lesson study has expanded to almost 60% out of 500 districts in Indonesia.

Though  rapid in expansion, lesson study practice is still encountering many difficulties. In the field man teachers seem only know lesson stud as plan, do, see cycle only, while the others know lesson study in the best practice but, do not implement lesson stud during in the daily teaching.  School principals also play important role in the practice of lesson study.  In many cases some school principals focus too much on the result of national examination, and do not pay much attention on the importance of teachers’ professional development or lesson study.  On the other hand, the government role to support lesson study also needs to be improved. In remotes area of Indonesia, some schools are located very far from the districts’ center or main areas, and taking long and expensive transportation to reach them. Lecturers from teacher training institute or university as consultant can hardly come o such remote areas to lecture the lesson study practice, if he do not really have enough time and finance.

Those  condition described above, and many other problems are very often found in field. Finally, in the future, the successfulness of lesson study practice depends largely not only from support of government, but also awareness of man stakeholders in education.