It’s great to be a professor. It is one of the most challenging and exciting jobs in the world. A professor is always engaged with the most energetic and young minds. A professor has to shape the minds which are in the state of highest conflict biologically and psychologically. The beauty of this profession creates a socio-educational environment where experience meets the energy. The professor always stays young in terms of his ideas and thoughts as he interacts with the youngest generation every year. (Knoell, 2012) says that the role of the teacher in shaping a child’s mind is phenomenal. He performed structured research on student-teacher relationship.
What is a professor’s job? and how it has evolved over the period of time? More realistically, what role a professor has to play in the modern ecosystem of education?
This can be explained by a diagram, defined as “Sustainable Faculty Tripod (SFT)”
SFT (Sustainable Faculty Tripod)
In modern ecosystem of education, a faculty has to perform three composite tasks for sustainable growth, not necessarily equally likely. A professors shall find the area of his/her strength out of the tripod and allocate the time weightage wisely. A faculty may choose the performance matrix as per self-allocated weightage.
The first part of the job of a professor is to disseminate knowledge. This part of the job is driven by the component of responsibility towards society, world, and humanity. A professor has to ensure that he crafts a manpower that can effectively add to human excellence. Innovative and creative teaching methods are required to keep the knowledge sharing process exciting, impactful, and alive. The most important factor here is to understand the psychology of the students as it is highly fluid. Every year a professor encounters brains with changed psychology. (Gablinske, 2014) states that the classroom learning atmosphere in an expressive way as proved by student work samples and student responses to teacher interface. Since, the professor is connected to the students closely, he is in best position to gaze at the weakness of the students and can mentor the student in the right direction. Quantitatively large classroom set-ups may through a challenge to effective mentoring, but it could be balanced out by maintaining a good faculty student ratio.
The second and most important part of the job for a professor is to create knowledge. Here the role of a professor differs from that of a school teacher. Apart from teaching the subjects, a school teacher’s additional job is to incorporate discipline, morals, humanity, and ethics in a child. While a professor’s major job dictates to create knowledge in his/her area of expertise. Until and unless the knowledge is created the world cannot advance to the next level of human brilliance. The major component to effectively engage in this part of the job is to involve in research. As soldier’s closest companion is a gun, a professor’s closest companion is knowledge resources. The aptitude of research develops from discussion and reading. A good researcher is always motivated to share his/her knowledge. Hence, a professor that is also a good researcher always has contemporary and innovative content to deliver. Systematic research leads to innovative ideas and solution to complex problems. Consulting is one of the easiest methods for transferring innovative ideas to the practitioners. Consulting also allows a professor to understand the gap between his ideas and practicality.
The third leg of the tripod is administration. Almost all the tasks performed in academic institution of higher education involve a higher level of intellect comparatively and need to be administered necessarily by a professor partially or completely. The events such as seminars, conferences, workshops, research-talks, student competitions, management games and else cannot be designed intellectually well if not administered by the professor. Hence it becomes a highly essential function of an academic institution that needs to be led by faculty.
In a nutshell, the teacher’s/ professor’s job is most challenging, responsible and a game changer in the progress of human race. “A successful professor has the capability to perform any job of the world”.
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