Semarang, 15 September 2025 – The Primary School Teacher Education (PGSD) Study Program at Universitas Negeri Semarang (UNNES), in collaboration with Melbourne University, conducted a joint teaching session in the School Management course for third-semester students. This initiative represents a tangible form of international collaboration to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 4) on Quality of Education.
In this program, Donnie Adams, Ph.D, Senior Lecturer in Education and Research at the Faculty of Education, Melbourne University, served as the inbound lecturer. He shared knowledge and insights on the importance of transformational leadership in school management, particularly how school leaders can foster inclusive environments while maintaining high academic performance.
Dr. Adams emphasized that transformational leadership is highly relevant in addressing the challenges of primary education in today’s global era. He explained that leadership is closely associated with change, reflecting a leader’s ability to drive innovation and renewal in schools. Meanwhile, management is strongly tied to maintenance, ensuring that new cultures, best practices, and established systems are preserved and sustained over time.
“A transformational leader must be able to initiate positive change in schools through visionary leadership, while at the same time ensuring, through effective management, that such change is preserved and consistently implemented,” said Dr. Adams. Thus, leadership and management are seen as two complementary dimensions: leadership creates change, while management safeguards its continuity and stability.
The joint teaching session was conducted in partnership with Dr. Wulan Aulia Azizah, M.Pd, lecturer of PGSD UNNES, who acted as the co-teaching counterpart. Through this collaboration, students gained international perspectives on how school principals, as transformational leaders, can empower teachers, nurture inclusive school cultures, and remain oriented toward educational quality. This collaboration demonstrates PGSD UNNES’s strong commitment to strengthening curriculum internationalization while providing meaningful learning experiences for future primary teachers. By equipping students with transformational leadership skills from the early stages of their training, they are expected to become change agents who contribute to improving the quality of primary education in Indonesia.
