Strategy and Implementation of Character Education in Senior High Schools and Vocational High Schools

Recently character education has been holding an important role for improving the human resources quality. This study aims to describe the strategy, the implementation and the results of character education in senior and vocational high schools in four provinces within the Java Island, Indonesia. The study was a phenomenology-type qualitative research. The data collection utilized a questionnaire and in-depth interviews. The participants in the study were 108 senior and vocational high school teachers from four provinces in Indonesia namely Yogyakarta Special Region, Central Java, West Java and Banten, Indonesia. The data analysis was conducted by implementing the Creswell’s steps. The results of the study showed that the strategy that the schools might implement in character education would be providing the character building facilities and designing good programs of character development. The schools implemented character education by providing role models, intervention, consistent habituation, and reinforcement. The results of the implementation yielded good results for the students’ character development. The obstacles that the schools had within character education were the students’ heterogeneity, the society’s paradigm which considered that the focus of the schools should be the cognitive development and limited facilities.