LECTURERS’ EXPERIENCES IN TEACHING SOFT SKILLS IN TEACHER PROFESSION EDUCATION PROGRAM (TPEP) IN INDONESIA

The Teacher Profession Education Program (hereafter abbreviated: TPEP) in Indonesia is a program designed to generate professional teachers. Every pre-service teacher must be equipped with adequate hard skills and soft skills before diving into a professional environment. This phenomenological research explored the lecturers' experiences in teaching soft skills to the students of TPEP. This research aims at getting a clear understanding of how soft skills teaching is implemented and what kinds of soft skills have been trained during TPEP. The data in this research were primarily collected through in-depth interviews conducted with 15 teaching lecturers from three universities that hold and organize the TPEP. Data analysis used analytic reduction which started from identifying important statements of the interview results, determining the core theme, and describing the essence of the entire experience. The results found that teaching soft skills with integrated/embedded models was used in the TPEP. Lecture, presentation, assignment, mentoring, and practice methods were used to train the TPEP students' soft skills. While the soft skills that have been trained during the implementation of the TPEP consist of ethics, self-reliance, responsibility, patience, critical thinking skills, communication skills, teamwork, tolerance, and social skills. The future research is expected to develop a criteria-based on integrated soft skills assessment model that can be used to assess the achievement of the acquisition of teachers' soft skills at the end of TPEP.