Abstract:

As in many international contexts, teacher evaluation occurs in universities in Indonesia through questionnaires, which the students are required to complete about their courses and their teachers’ performance. Unfortunately, many teachers do not use the result of that questionnaire as a source of feedback for their teaching improvement and personal development. Moreover, student feedback, by itself, is not sufficient to help teachers improve and, in any event, this evaluation is only used by the institution for purposes of performance review (Wesner, 2007). As a result, a great number of English teachers in Indonesia do not feel satisfied with this kind of summative/evaluative evaluation (Limantoro, 2003). Therefore, teachers in Indonesia have to rely on their own initiative if they wish to improve their teaching performance. Teacher self-evaluation appears to be a promising way to help English teachers in Indonesia to do self-learning to develop their teaching effectiveness. Unfortunately, the concept of teacher-self evaluation is still something new in the Indonesian schools setting (Zulfikar, 2009). The aim of this study is to analyze the challenges and the opportunities for introducing teacher self-evaluation to teachers in Indonesia, particularly English college teachers. This study uses case study as the research design. Nine college English teachers in a private university in Indonesia, who are varied in term of gender and teaching experience, are invited to take part in this study. The participants are encouraged to use audio-video recording, teacher self-reflection questions, student feedback, and action research as teacher self-evaluation instruments. Interview, focus group discussion, observation, and document analysis are used as the research instruments. The data show that teacher self-evaluation assists the teachers to see the strengths and limitations in their instructional practice so that they can make some changes in their teaching to produce better teaching and learning outcomes. Focus group discussions as a part of collaborative action research enable teachers to implement new teaching techniques in their class as the result of sharing with other teachers. The challenges in implementing teacher self-evaluation are divided into two aspects: internal and external. The internal aspect includes the self-awareness and time availability, whereas the external factor includes facility availability and lack of support and control from institution. Since there is limited research about the practice of teacher self-evaluation in Indonesia, this study increases the scholarly literature on teacher self-evaluation which is more sensitive to contextual differences in Indonesia education.

Keywords:

Evaluation, Self-Evaluation, Collaborative Action Research, Case Study.