PHILOSOPHY
The Teacher Training and Professional Development Program is core to our Mission and is one of our major contributions to improving the development and overall quality of education in Kalimantan.
In collaboration with Barclays Bank and Yayasan Usaha Mulia (‘YUM’), this Program run by BCU, is to encourage and promote long-lasting educational strength in the province; a key component is improving teaching methods through training local teachers in Child-Centered teaching practices.
What is Child-Centered Education?
In Child-Centered education the student is the active participant in the learning process, rather than the passive recipient of a predetermined mass of knowledge. BCU School follows this ‘Child-Centered’ approach where each student is recognized to have his or her own pace and character, and different strengths and weaknesses. The younger children have the opportunity to experience childhood in a playful and natural setting. An eight-year-old child, for example, is seen as an eight year old to be developed to his or full potential as an eight year old, rather than as a future nine, or even 15 year old. Elder students are active in a variety of sports and music for which the school provides the necessary facilities (a 15-metre swimming pool and a large football field). They also mentor and tutor younger students that are new or need extra friendship.
BACKGROUND
The province of Central Kalimantan has an adequate number of schools but continually lacks in providing a qualified standard of education. Reasons for this are numerous and complex, but the major reason resides in the number of untrained teachers. According to the Education Department of Central Kalimantan, 75% of teachers in the province of Central Kalimantan are untrained. Experts say the real figures are higher than this as degrees are readily available for purchase and distort the statistics to unrealistic levels.
Over the past two years, Yayasan Usaha Mulia (Foundation for Noble Work, ‘YUM’) has developed a relationship with Bina Cita Utama (‘BCU’). Through this collaboration, outreach programs have been designed to assist BCU in the improvement of educational levels of children in villages of the greater vicinity.
By 2009, the Barclays-BCU-YUM Teacher Training Program trained 90 Indonesian government schoolteachers in the Rungan Sari area. This program has the full support of the Education Department in Palangkaraya and will continue in 2010…
PROPOSED IMPLEMENTATION:
A nine-week course would be held four times a year. Each course accommodates 20 participants, resulting in a total of 80 teachers to be trained in one year. As each teacher normally has 40 students in their class, the number of ultimate beneficiaries – children – would be roughly 3,200 students per year, with the ripple-benefit effect of even greater proportions n the years to come.
Every Saturday, a 4-hour training workshop is held on BCU campus. During the weekdays, the trainers visit the participants’ classroom as class is in session to observe, monitor and give feedback on the implementation of that week’s workshop.
PROGRAM
Each course would cover:
1. Classroom management
2. Child-Centered education
3. Discovery learning
4. Multiple intelligences
5. Learning styles
6. Project-based learning in large classrooms
Throughout these sessions we would also introduce the prospects of certain writing skills across the various genres and across the curriculum, as well as other practical curriculum-type instructional ideas. Upon successful completion of the course, participants would be awarded with a certificate.
We are aware that many of the teachers will have constraints with resources, but we also hope to help them discover was in which, through their own creativity and inventiveness, they can generate their own resources.