Teacher’s Perspectives toward the Impact of Teacher Professional Development at Islamic School

Abstract

Teacher professional development is characterized as strategy to improve teacher’s proficiencies and meet the changing professional needs in the field. Meanwhile, teacher professional development at Islamic School is conducted to help the teacher in improving teaching practice. English teacher at Islamic school is not only required to teach English but also integrating Islamic values through teaching materials and classroom activities. Therefore, this study aimed to describe and explore teacher’s perspectives toward the impact of professional development at Islamic School. This qualitative study used semi-structured interview to collect the data. The result showed that there were professional development activities that had been conducted by the teacher. There were Reflective Teaching to reflect teaching performances and Teacher's Training to develop performances in the classroom. The teacher was inspired by the materials that were given in teacher's training and the teacher was motivated to conduct some methods in teaching activities inside the classroom. However, the teacher acknowledged new requirements of being English teacher at Islamic school. The teacher realized that teaching at Islamic school is always related to Islamic values. The teacher experienced some challenges in integrating Islamic values in the classroom but the teacher sees this as a challenge which motivates the teacher to be more creative in creating materials.