Exploring Teacher’s Perspective of the Implementation of KTSP
Curriculum in One of Junior High Schools in Bandung
Nimal Fuyudloturrohmaniyyah
Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia
Keywords: Curriculum Evaluation, Teacher’s Perspective, KTSP.
Abstract: Evaluating curriculum implementation is suggested by many experts to gain information from which
challenges that hamper the achievement of learning goals can be immediately handled. Accordingly, this
study investigated curriculum implementation of KTSP (school-based curriculum) in one of junior high
schools in Bandung under a qualitative research design especially a case study by means of teacher’s
interview. The data were analyzed through categorization and description. The results indicate that the
respondent is allowed to explore and define the curriculum herself. Among four curriculum activities,
selecting materials is the most challenging task in curriculum implementation as she mostly utilizes internet-
based sources and powerpoint slides which consume much time of preparation. To overcome this challenge
some suggestions are provided to give her more insights in developing learning materials.
1 INTRODUCTION
Evaluation has been justified beneficial in providing
information of the achievement of a program’s goal.
Curriculum which serves as an educational program
requires such evaluation which is of curriculum
activities alongside with its planning and
implementation (Richards, 2001, pp. 1).
Unfortunately, constant monitoring of curriculum is
rarely achieved consistently at school level (Print,
1993, p. 219).
Accordingly, this present study tries to figure out
the implementation of a curriculum in one of junior
high schools in Bandung. In other words, this study
investigated how documented curriculum, known as
official curriculum, serves as basic guideline for
teachers to govern teaching and learning process, also
known as operational curriculum.
After the documented curriculum put into action,
then this operational curriculum should have gone
under cautious evaluation to detect problems raised
during the implementation of the curriculum,
afterward viable suggestions to cope up with them
can be decided (Kemendikbud, 2012). It is also
argued that periodic evaluation should then be done
in order to see how teachers implement the
curriculum and how successfully it has achieved the
objectives of the teaching of English (Putra, 2014). In
larger scale, evaluation is a powerful means of
improving the quality of education (Agrawal, 2004).
The curriculum in focus is KTSP or school-based
curriculum. In its implementation, each school
through teachers gets an authority to develop its own
curriculum (Suratno, 2014). KTSP is worth
investigating as it opens multi-interpretation in real
practice (Diknas, 2012, in Sahiruddin, 2013)
The study covers evaluation of four main
components of curriculum; learning goal formulation,
content and material selection, and evaluation design
to determine students’ learning achievement.
Cautious evaluation of the implemented curriculum is
useful to detect problems raised during the
implementation of the curriculum, afterward viable
suggestions to cope up with them can be decided
(Kemendikbud, 2012). It is also argued that periodic
evaluation should be done in order to see how
teachers implement the curriculum and how
successfully it has achieved the objectives of the
teaching of English (Putra, 2014). In larger scale,
evaluation is a powerful means of improving the
quality of education (Agrawal, 2004).
To reveal the objective stated earlier, this research
is guided by the following research questions:
1. How is English curriculum implemented in one
of junior high school in Bandung?
2. What are the challenges during the
implementation of curriculum?
290
Fuyudloturrohmaniyyah, N.
Exploring Teacher’s Perspective of the Implementation of KTSP Curriculum in One of Junior High Schools in Bandung.
DOI: 10.5220/0007166102900294
In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference
on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education (CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017) - Literacy, Culture, and Technology in Language Pedagogy and Use, pages 290-294
ISBN: 978-989-758-332-2
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved

To know what effects a curriculum brings to the
teaching practice will be very beneficial for educators
to make educational decisions to be later on
implemented as the response toward the drawbacks
identified. By having this activity continuously taken
place, the betterment for our education system will
not be lasted as a dream.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
In any model of curriculum whether
rational/objective models, cyclical models, or
dynamic/interaction models (Print, 1993, p. 61), the
evaluation stage is always included. By doing this
activity, problems raised during the implementation
of the curriculum can be detected, afterward viable
suggestions to cope up with them can be decided
(Kemendikbud, 2012).
As well, it is due to the fact that the curriculum for
many times does not suit to the needs of the students
(Yürekli, 2012) and calls for a change or at least
revision should be taken place. Moreover, to evaluate
the curriculum is significant in order to update the
methodology utilized, the content and other
curriculum features (Al-Jardani, 2011, in Al-Jardani,
2012).
Continual monitoring and the provision of
substantive feedback entail a great call as it reports
the direction for needed changes (Print, 1993, p. 219).
The willingness and ability of developers to
accommodate changes to their curriculum will lead to
the success of a curriculum’s implementation (Print,
1993, p. 218).
The concept of curriculum evaluation is what
Posner (1992) addressed as curriculum analysis.
Having acknowledged about the concept of
curriculum evaluation or curriculum analysis, another
question may come up regarding what to analyze.
Curriculum analysis can range from an analysis of a
single curriculum document- for example, a teacher
guide- to a research project, including library
searches and extensive interview with curriculum
project leaders (Posner, 1992, p. 33
Thus, in this research curriculum evaluation as
well curriculum analysis refer to the same idea that it
is an attempt to examine the curriculum focusing on
a particular or some aspects of it, such as how
components of a curriculum are structured and
arranged, how the curriculum is used in the
classroom, and how teachers use the curriculum in
their teaching. Also, its main purpose is to provide
information of such aspects on which making
decision and judgment are depended upon.
Previous research shows many curriculums have
been investigated to gain the benefits of curriculum
evaluation as discussed in previous section of this
paper. Presented below are three research reports of
three different curriculums in different contexts.
A research accomplished by Karabulut and
Fodrey (2010) set the curriculum of online master of
education in Iowa State University as the object of
curriculum analysis. Thethe curriculum was analyzed
by using Posner’s curriculum analysis framework. It
was found that the target audience of the curriculum
is prospective students who are interested in pursuing
an online degree. Students are required to take pre-
defined courses and offered to choose courses freely.
Students are also given a help from faculty members
if they have any problems during the online learning.
The purpose of this program is professional
development where students are expected get some
improvement in their technical skills, effective
technology integration, and acquisition of job skills.
On the other hand, lack of teacher training in online
teaching is considered to be a disadvantage of this
program. Thus, it is suggested more faculty members
are involved in this program after getting trained and
given adequate resources to create a supportive online
learning environment.
Yürekli (2012) conducted a research analyzing the
curriculum renewal in EAP context for freshman in
Faculty of Computer Sciences at a university in
Turkey. The research seeks academic skills needed by
students and identify the relevant teaching method
which will be beeficial to help students perceive their
needs. The result shows that students need to learn the
four language skills as well as vocabulary which is
specifically related to the subject they are majoring
in. Also, they are hoped to be able to use English for
functional purposes.
To get those objectives, some teaching
methodologies are suggested to employ such as
integrated skills teaching, in which the four language
skills are learned simultanously; content-based and
task-base instruction, which make student interact
with content in a meaningful and purposeful way;
integration of vocabulary and grammar as the most
basic units in language.
Another research with respect to curriculum
analysis was undertaken by Sahiruddin (2013). His
work emphasized on the implementation of the 2013
curriculum and related issues regarding its influence
to the teaching and learning process. The 2013
curriculum is the response of limitation of 2006’s
curriculum such as a number of subjects learned, it is
not competency-based in practice, competency does
not reflect domain of knowledge, skills, and affective
Exploring Teacher’s Perspective of the Implementation of KTSP Curriculum in One of Junior High Schools in Bandung
291

behaviour, the equilibrium of developing soft skills
and hard skills, teacher-oriented learning, neglected
process-based and product-based assessment, and
multiinterpretation.
Yet, some constraints are detected in the
implementation of the newest curriculum. First of all
regarding the disseminating the information of the
curriculum inclusing the content and recommended
teaching techniques. Second one related to the idea of
student-centered classroom since in Indonesia
context teacher-centeredness has been happening for
a very long time. Lastly, in respect to textbook
uniformity which represents only certain culture. It
becomes a problem since Indonesian students’ varied
sociocultural background. Eventhough the research
provides very relevant issues happened in Indonesian
context as the 2013 curriculum is implemented,
unfortunately, the researcher does not provide any
feasible recommendation to overcome those
problems.
Regarding this paper, curriculum analysis is
intended to gather teacher’s perspective toward the
implementation of KTSP curriculum in one of junior
high schools in Bandung. Particularly, this research
explores how curriculum is broken down into
learning goal, how it frames the contents, how the
contents can be explored through materials, and how
the learning achievement is assessed. Consequently,
actual problems can be identified therefore feasible
solution will be determined.
3 METHOD
3.1 Research Design
As the research is intended to describe the
implementation of curriculum at schools, thus,
qualitative descriptive approach corresponds well to
the objective of this research. Descriptive study is
used to describe condition, phenomenon, event,
activity, and so on in which the result will be
explained in the form of report (Fraenkel, Wallen, &
Hyun, 2012).
3.2 Respondent
An English teacher is purposely chosen as the
respondent of this research based on criteria as
follows: (1) having at least one-year experience of
implementing KTSP (school-based curriculum); (2)
directly involved in all curriculum implementation
activities; and (3) having a great devotion to the
betterment of the implementation of the curriculum in
her own classes.
3.3 Instrumentation
The data are gathered through teacher’s interview
which serves as empirical data of how English
teaching is carried out in the classroom. The
respondent was asked several open-ended questions
as follows:
1. What do you expect your students will be able
to do after learning English?
2. Why do you think so?
3. What contents do you cover in your teaching?
4. Why do you select those contents?
5. What are teaching media you use in your class?
6. Why do you provide such media?
7. How your students’ learning achievement is
assessed?
8. Why do you assess such assessment?
9. What are challenges of each curriculum
activity (formulating learning goal, selecting
content and material, and designing
evaluation system)?
10. How do you overcome those challenges?
3.4 Procedure
Before deciding the respondent, a preliminary survey
was conducted by asking three English teachers about
their involvement in curriculum activities. Then, the
respondent was chosen based on the criteria set in
advance. Later, the interview was carried out on
Friday, 29 of April 2016 and lasted for about 30
minutes. The interviews covered ten questions as
presented in the previous subsection.
3.5 Data analysis
The analysis of the interview focuses on five aspects
in implementing the curriculum which are learning
goal formulation (question number 1, 2), contents
selection (question number 3, 4), materials selection
(question number 5, 6), evaluation system (question
number 7, 8), and challenges in carrying out each
process (question number 9, 10). Simply speaking,
the analysis will be going through three steps: data
reduction through coding, checking hypotheses and
theories, and description (Malik and Hamied, 2016).
CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017 - Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology
Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education
292

4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
This section reports the data gained from the
interview along with the analysis related to relevant
theories regarding four elements of curriculum
analysis: (a) learning goal formulation; (a) contents
selection; (c) materials selection; and (d) evaluation
system.
a) Learning goal formulation
The respondent believes that her teaching is
intended to train students’ listening and speaking
skills as the teachers believe that a language is learned
not only to understand its system and its elements.
However, she does not expect the students to have
native-like listening and speaking skills but rather
expecting the students to able to maintain simple
conversation in English with each other. This goal is
in accordance what is called as mutual intelligibility
meaning that students understand what their
interlocutor says and they can communicate with each
other (Kirkpatrick, 2015).
However, she argues that the rational for
formulating that learning goal which does not put
emphasize on written texts is because students will
learn more about texts in the next grade (grade 8
th
and
9
th
). Also, the respondent contends that by being able
to speak English students will be more confident to
participate in learning. By actively participate in
learning students will be able construct more
information as they are listening and speaking
simultaneously.
In regard to the challenge in formulating the
learning goal, the respondent does not mention any.
The head master of the school gives each teacher
freedom to create his/her own learning goal.
Nonetheless, even the teacher is given freedom to
govern her own learning goal she cannot simply
ignore the recent view of English language teaching
that the recent trend of research and practice in
English language teaching has been retaining on skill
integration oriented (Brown, 2001, p. 232).
Also, the instruction has to address a range of L2
skills simultaneously, all of which are requisite in
communication (Hinkel, 2006). As they are used to
utilizing their four language skills in the classroom,
they are hoped to be able to be good English language
users in their future personal and professional life.
b) Contents selection
As the teacher believes that learning a language is
best through practice producing the target language,
the contents are intentionally selected to aid students
rehearsing the target language production such as
language expressions which emphasize more on
meaning than on form. Even so, the teacher does not
necessarily neglect reading and writing sessions at all.
She includes the contents from which students can
practice their reading and writing skills too for
instance writing a movie review after reading some of
the examples of it.
She selects the contents among those which are
stated in the KTSP document by considering which
can more accommodating students to practice their
speaking skills, which will be more interesting to
them, and which is neither too challenging nor too
easy. By bearing those criteria in mind, she does not
find any significant hurdles in selecting the contents.
c) Materials selection
The respondent revealed that students do not have
particular textbooks. She further added that students
will get easily bored when they work on the same
textbook during the whole lesson. Moreover, since
the learning goal focuses to build students’ ability to
communicate in English so it is considered best to
provide students with audio material which can offer
the example of target language spoken by its native
speakers. Providing students with a variety of
authentic use of language in texts and talks will help
them to get the opportunity to discover the context of
target language culture (Putra, 2014).
Nonetheless, a challenge is identified as the
teacher, sometimes, feels frustrated when she does
not have enough time to search materials from
internet sources as well prepare the powerpoint slides.
Because, to her, the learning process will not be well
delivered without any support from those technology
features. Also, when she does not have topic to talk
about, she asks for help from another English teacher
to give her some suggestions. Materials selection is
indeed the most difficult activity in implementing the
curriculum for the respondent.
d) Evaluation system
Evaluation is universally accepted as an integral
part of teaching and learning (Agrawal, 2004). It
provides not only information of students’
achievement but it also tells the quality of the
program. Those benefits cannot be attended nicely
unless the evaluation is well-prepared and well-
designed.
To evaluate students’ achievement, the teacher
prefers test-based evaluation and performance-based
evaluation which is consistent with the score ranging
from 0-100. She conducts 2-3 tests excluding mid –
term exam and final exam. If she gets a plenty of time,
the tests will cover both receptive and productive
skills assessment. But, when the time is limited she
tends to conduct only written tests.
Whereas, KTSP suggests the evaluation should
promotes the following aspects (Kemendikbud,
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293

2006): (1) mastery learning, (2) authentic assessment
(measuring affectiv, psychomotor, and cognitive
aspects through product and process-oriented
assessment), (3) continuity, (4) apply criterion-
referenced scoring in which students’ scores are
compared to the standard score set in advance, and (5)
use several techniques to evaluate learning
achievement.
This evaluation concept proposed by the
government is identical with the concept of authentic-
holistic-integrative approach to assess students’
competence suggested by Suherdi (2012). Authentic
concerns with assessment in or near to natural real
setting, for instance, measuring students speaking
skill through presentation in which students will
produce oral language. Holistic deals with being
comprehensive, it includes measuring students’
cognitive, affective, and psychomotor behavior.
Meanwhile, integrative means incorporate both a set
formative assessments and summative assessment.
By having comprehensive assessment approach
presented above, it is expected students’ learning
progress will be better catered and relevant decisions
can be made.
5 CONCLUSION
Curriculum as the map of how the teaching and
learning activity is going to be carried out calls for
careful treatment before and during its
implementation. Teachers ought to take some times
to analyze and comprehend the intention of a
curriculum being and or going to be implemented
with other teachers or curriculum experts. By having
curriculum analysis before its implementation,
teachers may avoid bad impact of its weaknesses.
While during its implementation, when some
restraints of the curriculum are recognized, teachers
will try to find ways to fix them and make some
changes and modification in line with their beliefs,
without neglecting the standards set by the
government. Analyzing curriculum is one of means
to know what makes a good teaching and learning.
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Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education
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