PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS' PERCEPTION ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF INTERNSHIP PROGRAM

The internship program prepares pre-service teachers to become future teachers. This is accomplished by allowing them to practice teaching in a real situation. In the internship program, pre-service teachers are taught not only content knowledge that can be gained from classroom learning, but also pedagogical skills that can be acquired. This study aimed to investigate the pre-service teachers’ perception on the implementation of internship program. To accomplish the objective of this research, the researcher used a qualitative method with descriptive qualitative design. The research was conducted in ELED of a private university in Yogyakarta. The obtained data were gathered through interviewing six students of ELED at a private university in Yogyakarta who have experience in joining internship programs. As a result there are eight findings related to the benefits of internship program as perceived by the pre-service teacher, such as encouraging the confidence in teaching, enhancing pre-service teachers to be more discipline, exercising the pre-service teacher’s patience in teaching, the pre-service teachers know how to do teaching preparation, improving teaching material mastery, enhancing teaching technique, being able to handle students with diverse characters, and experiencing real teaching environment. Then, there are nine findings related to the challenges the pre-service teachers perceived from the internship program such as developing engaging material, creating proper lesson plan, delivering material, feeling nervous while teaching students, having difficulties to interact with students, overwhelming students’ behavior, difficulties to interact with supervisor, implementing online teaching, and time allocation. Then, the third finding revealed that pre-service teachers have their own strategy to overcome the challenges. Furthermore, there are six findings related to strategies such as doing teaching preparation,maximizing teaching exercise, initiating interaction with students, applying fun teaching technique, having discussion with supervisor, and using technology for distant communication