NORLIZA KUSHAIRI, UUM
The recent budget allocation for education in Malaysia reflects the government's commitment to investing in education and valuing teachers as agents of change.
With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the educational system in Malaysia underwent a complete transformation from physical to digital. This unprecedented situation has actually provided teachers and learners with opportunities to develop new skills, especially those related to digitalization and research skills.
However, to keep up with the demands of a rapidly changing society, it is crucial for teachers to receive adequate training to upskill and upgrade their competencies. With the significant investment made in education, it is reasonable to expect a return on investment in terms of improved skills, knowledge, and expertise among teachers.
Over the years, many teachers have shown great interest in joining professional development courses, some of which are initiated by the Ministry of Education and award e-certificates through the Sistem Pengurusan Latihan Guru (SPLM). However, despite teachers engaging in professional development and research activities, and accumulating numerous certificates, there is a lack of evidence on teachers' identity as scholars. This poses a significant concern as a scholarly identity is crucial for continuous learning and improvement, which is necessary for effective teaching and adapting to changes in the educational landscape. Additionally, the lack of a scholarly identity can marginalize teaching as a profession, negatively impacting teacher recruitment and retention.
To address this issue, a team of researchers from UUM conducted a cross-sectional study on 700 teachers to determine the composites that qualify teachers as scholars. One of the proposed composites for the teacher-scholar model is learning capacity or learning power, namely Malaysian Teacher Learning Power (MTLP). The researchers developed a scale based on the effective lifelong learning inventory proposed by Deakin Crick et al. (2006) to identify the primary dimensions of learning power that teachers ascribe to while undertaking professional development. The seven dimensions proposed by ELLI are changing and learning, meaning making, critical curiosity, resilience, creativity, learning relationships, and strategic awareness.
Through Principal Component Analysis, new dimensions were derived from the seven original components, namely Strategic Organizing, Learning Reflexivity, Changing and Learning, and Self-Efficacy. The findings suggest that Malaysian teachers could retain themselves in lifelong learning endeavors, making them apt to be identified as scholars.
However, in interviews with some informants, there seems to be a tension between what is expected from teachers and how they interpret the scholarly identity. While many teachers responded positively to research and scientific activities, there is still a gap in their capability to relate their classroom practices with scientific theories, and disseminate their work in scholarly publications. This highlights a mismatch between the objectives of the training provided for teachers and the output of the highly spent trainings. The idealistic representation of teachers as scholarly professionals possessing characteristics such as "teacher-researcher," "reflective-practitioner," and "self-directed learner" is not being fully realized.
Therefore, a close scrutiny of the training provisions should be conducted to examine the input and process of professional development courses in ways that could nurture the intellectual capabilities of teachers and enable them to possess the quality of scholarly teachers.
