Building Up Teachers’ Autonomy through Collegial Skill Improvement Activities

 

 

Antonius Suratno

 

It has become the most recent awareness that becoming autonomous is not merely the students’ but also the teachers’ concerns. Many books on autonomous learning have been published and thus inspired the emergence of self-learning oriented methodologies and the provision of many facilities in support of such methodologies. Self-access materials and learners’ diaries are two cases in points. Various projects and workshops or seminars on this area have also been extensively made. Sharing various potential inspiring ideas concerning how various institutions build up their teachers’ autonomy, however, has still been limitedly made, if we don’t want to say none. It may be because such a particular concern has still been underestimated in terms of its urgency among the outnumbered ELT’s attentions. This paper is, therefore, mainly aimed to share what is so-called collegial skill improvement activities done in Centre for Language Training (CLT) Soegijapranata Catholic University. This paper, by nature, is an experiential/empirical elaboration,  as it will basically start with accounts of the above activities which are then given personal justification in the light of the teachers’ autonomy concern. This paper, in general, might be less scientific in a sense that it is mainly personal accounts. To lessen the possibility of being too subjective and bias, however, every account made is justified based on the literary reviews. The sharing is focusing on such activities as teacher sharing, teaching and media presentations, observational feed-back session, and student questionnaire. It is shown in this paper that the above activities have resulted in a consistent skill progress which leads to the creation of a more autonomous individual teacher. 

 

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Suratno, A. (2002, March). Building up teachers’ autonomy through collegial skill improvement activities. Paper presented at the national conference on Autonomy, Bandung, Indonesia.

 
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