From Policy Adoption to Teacher Capacity: Professional Learning in an Indonesian Merdeka Curriculum Pilot School

Abstract

Curriculum reform can be formally adopted before teachers have developed the professional capacity needed to enact it. This qualitative secondary analysis examines how an Indonesian public secondary school participating in the national Sekolah Penggerak initiative built teacher capacity during its early transition to the Merdeka Curriculum. The analysis reuses an archived 2023 case-study corpus that had previously supported a publication on general school implementation strategies; the present manuscript asks a distinct question and returns to the full thesis corpus of nine school informants, observations, and documentary materials. Reanalysis focused on shared sensemaking, professional learning activities, translation of curriculum knowledge into classroom practice, organizational supports, and reflection. The findings show a five-part capacity-building cycle: socialization and deliberation established a shared interpretation of reform; in-house training, workshops, webinars, subject-teacher forums, and a study visit expanded professional knowledge; diagnostic assessment and differentiated learning connected that knowledge to classroom decisions; digital and material infrastructure enabled new practices; and evaluation generated new professional-learning needs. The study argues that curriculum implementation is better understood as an iterative capacity-practice-reflection cycle than as compliance with a sequence of policy requirements. This interpretation extends early Indonesian Merdeka Curriculum studies by specifying the organizational mechanism through which professional learning becomes classroom enactment.