The Coalition partnership with the Putera Sampoerna Foundation – School Development Outreach (PSF-SDO) began in earnest on February 27, 2019 with a research workshop to create customized data collection instruments for a needs and situation analysis of PSF-SDO’s teacher learning centers (TLCs) across Indonesia. This workshop is the first milestone in the Coalition’s partnership with PSF-SDO to document and improve the process of developing TLCs as the hub for TPD@Scale Indonesia.

Established in a kabupaten or regency (equivalent to a municipality), the TLC is a systematic and structured independent learning organization managed by teachers under the supervision of the local government. The TLC is able to plan, develop, and initiate programs to strengthen teacher competencies and build a robust professional learning community. Each TLC is intended to serve between 15,000 to 18,000 teachers in the regency. To date, PSF-SDO has built and continues to support 10 TLCs in Surabaya, Lumajang, Pasuruan, Karawang, Bojonegoro, Tuban, Kudus, Gowa, and Musi Banyuasin.

In his opening remarks, Gusman Yahya, Director of PSF-SDO, highlighted the limitations of Indonesia when it comes to teacher professional development (TPD). “Most of our efforts in TPD@Scale in the TLC are done face-to-face. We need to know the situation of the TLCs and identify the gaps in order to make TPD accessibility more efficient compared to what we have right now.”

During the two-day workshop, Cher Ping Lim, Coalition Research and Development Manager, led the PSF-SDO team in customizing the Coalition’s research framework and instruments, anchored on the main research question: “How is the TLC mediated by technologies to enhance access of teachers to quality professional learning?” Prof. Lim proposed that PSF-SDO think of the Indonesian TLC model as iterative, with continuing cycles of data collection and analysis to inform TLC operations.

The workshop also featured a brief talk on improving teacher quality by Danny Bielik, CEO of Burst Learning. Mr. Bielik spoke of the failure of e-learning to deliver good outcomes, underscoring problems of low engagement and completion, difficulty in achieving scale, and credibility.

Over the next two months, the PSF-SDO team will conduct focused group discussions and interviews with a sampling of TLCs. Target respondents are the TLC teacher participants, master teachers, TLC managers, school principals, local government/education office officials, and PSF-SDO facilitators. The needs and situational analysis is expected to be completed by July 2019.

Photo from Putera Sampoerna Foundation.