Abstract

This study aims at exploring teachers’ perceptions of characteristics of teacher’s professionalism. This study also identifies understanding of teachers on seven criteria of teacher professionalism that are educating, teaching, guiding, instructing, training, evaluating, and reflecting. In addition, this study was conducted to observe how the seven elements of teacher professionalism have been practiced in high school classroom. The research instruments were (1) open-ended questions to explore the teachers’ perception of the characteristics of teacher’s professionalism, (2) fixed-response forms to identify percentage of teachers’ understanding on the scope of duty of teachers’ professionalism, and (3) observation checklist to identify percentage of teacher’s professionalism practices in classroom. Data was analysed by using thematic and descriptive approaches. Four themes emerged from this study are students’ behaviour management, teaching and learning in classroom, encouragement and Evaluation, and students’ performance. The data shows that the teachers are familiar with teaching professionalism. Data also revealed that quite a high percentage of teachers understand the scope of teacher’s professionalism. However, when it comes to practice, they employ it unsatisfactorily. The implication is that practice of professionalism in the classroom needs to be promoted in comparison with the other elements.

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