Apprenticeship Implementation of Productive Teacher at Vocational School in Indonesia

The Indonesian government has established a regulation on apprenticeship program for vocational teacher in the relevant industry. It is a structured training program which aims to provide teachers with knowledge and competency required to achieve mastery of a specific occupation for strengthening their pedagogical role in vocational education. This article presents the current practice of the teacher apprenticeship in Indonesia, especially in vocational high school. The evaluation assesses three main topics: school–industry partnership, description of general issues in the teacher apprenticeship program and effectiveness of the apprenticeship program. The research approach used is narrative inquiry which involves several respondents from vocational schools and selected companies. The sample sizes of the purposive sampling utilized are 44 school principals, 24 representatives from industry, 102 students and 88 teachers. This research indicated a mismatch between the competencies of the newly graduates and the requirement of industry. The unbalance of theory with practice could be one of the reasons of that gap. It was also observed that the industry engagement in the vocational education is considered to be low. The school has planned a teacher apprenticeship, but it has not been implemented properly. The teacher apprenticeship carried out so far is still dominated by mastery of knowledge with little practice. As suggestion for the government, as a program, Apprenticeship is designed to be flexible and able to adaptive to the needs of employers and apprentices across the economy as a whole. Keywords—teacher apprenticeship; vocational learning; graduate quality