Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs and the Development of Autonomous
English Teachers in Indonesia
Basikin
Decentralization of
educational decision-making potentially provides teachers with power and
autonomy to make decisions concerning the school and classroom teaching
practices. However, especially when teachers are not ready to act on the
autonomy and to deal with challenges they face, it might also create a new set
of problems. There is the possibility that wider teacher autonomy might promote
confusion instead of educational improvement.
This paper argues that many
English teachers in Indonesia are not ready to, and perhaps are unable to act
autonomously in their professional lives. Previously teachers have been used to
applying whatever the central government has asked them to implement through a
prescribed curriculum, Curriculum 1994. These existing cultural practices did
not encourage teacher autonomy. Therefore, now that the opportunity is widely
available for teachers to have the power to decide what curriculum materials to
bring into the classroom, teachers are not comfortable exercising this newly
found autonomy. Thus, there is no guarantee that autonomy alone will
necessarily contribute to improving the quality of the teaching that teachers
provide on a daily basis.
It is therefore suggested
that if teachers are to act confidently and exercise their autonomy in
curricular decision-making, then their self-efficacy beliefs are of importance,
especially if they are to own the reform agenda. Self-efficacy beliefs are
instrumental in affecting the effort teachers put into teaching, in setting
goals, and in the aspiration teachers have for themselves and their students.
Furthermore, a high sense of efficacy is influential in the teachers' level of
teaching enthusiasm (Allinder, 1994; Guskey, 1984; Pajares, 2002), commitment
to teaching (Coladarci, 1992), with highly efficacious teachers tending to
exercise higher levels of planning and organization (Allinder, 1994). As well
as being persistent in dealing with problems and being more resilient in the
face of setbacks (Ashton & Webb, 1986), they are more open to new ideas and
willing to experiment with new methods (Guskey, 1988; Stein & Wang, 1988;
Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001) Thus, how to build a high sense of efficacy
among English teachers and how these beliefs contribute to teachers' autonomy
are important questions.
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Basikin. (2006,
December). Teachers self-efficacy beliefs and the development of autonomous English
teachers in Indonesia. Paper
presented at the 54th TEFLIN International conference,
Website: www.geocities.com/eltindonesia
Email: eltindonesia@yahoo.com