Image Of A Modern Successful University Teacher

Abstract

The article deals with the importance of a modern university teacher (and mentor) for the future students who will help them to become a qualified candidate in the chosen specialty. As the title implies, the article describes the leadership skills of a mentor, his knowledge and his attitude to work. The aim of the article is to show that the teacher (mentor) has to be constantly developing and take additional courses, lectures, and engage in self-development. Much attention is given to communication with students and the personality of a teacher and such features as sense of humor, responsibility, independence, kindness and so on. The results show that the successful mentor should completely trust students, learn from them and help students to identify their weaknesses and get rid of them as well as develop his own soft skills. Summing up the results, it can be concluded that a successful modern teacher (mentor) must keep up with modern changes of education and be creative, smart, charismatic and thirsty for the knowledge as well as to be a good psychologist. Higher education teachers should constantly undergo additional retraining, and remain a person-example for students who is interesting to listen to and who can be trusted.

Keywords: Mentor, successful teacher, soft skills, self-development, students, university teacher

Introduction

When entering a university, applicants most often do not completely understand what profession they wanted to associate their future with. They choose a specialty based on interests that they got at the school desk. Future students expect from teachers of higher professional education to acquire knowledge and learn to think in such a way that will help them to become a qualified candidate. However, more often than not, the university becomes a place where persons meet not just teachers, but mentors who help them choose the desired trajectory of development. It is their school whose graduates are trying not only to apply in their practice, but also to hand it down to next generations.

The image of a higher school teacher is such an integral characteristic that includes a set of external and internal individual, personal and professional qualities of a teacher, which contributes to the effectiveness of pedagogical activity.

Achieving such a harmonious set of qualities requires the teacher to be aware of actions, which in turn is impossible without reflection. On the other hand, in order to reflect on the characteristics, the teacher needs to know what requirements the student audience and colleagues are making. Perhaps only a mentor can be rightfully considered a successful teacher.

Problem Statement

So who is a mentor? First of all, this is a specialist who seeks to pass on to students all the best knowledge. When teachers are not specialists, there will be nothing to teach students. If teachers do not love they work, then this attitude will be passed on to the students, and it is unlikely that after graduation they will go to work in their specialty. You have probably met students more than once who chose a profession because of a good teacher they had in school. Or, on the contrary, they refused to associate life with the subject because for their whole life they had an association with a bad teacher.

A mentor must be constantly developing and monitor how the sphere changes over time, so that one’s knowledge is relevant and in demand. Often, practicing in various places, students realize what knowledge is really important today and what is out of date. A teacher should remain helpful to students who might want a consultation with him or her. A good teacher also should, like students, take additional courses and lectures, and engage in self-development. More than two hundred years ago, Vasily Zhukovsky, the teacher of the heir to the throne of Alexander II, dreamed of giving his pupil the best education. Therefore, he himself could not leave the library for days, constantly supplementing it. Today, this quality is still relevant.

Second, the mentor must be a trusted person who can communicate and pass on their knowledge to other people. The teacher's success depends on his personality. Entering the classroom, from the first minutes, students will treat a lecturer with greater trust and respect, who knows how to share charisma, energy, ability to captivate the subject rather than a gloomy professor who does not take his eyes off the book. Smirnov wrote in his book that charisma is a necessary quality for a teacher as well as erudition and sociability (Smirnov, 1995).

The author emphasizes that a teacher's energy must be sincere, since it is pretense that becomes the quality that repels most of all. A good teacher should feel feedback from students: if they understand, if it is needed to clarify, explain, or repeat something to them.

Research Questions

There are even some techniques that could be used to help to become a successful teacher. These are introspection and assessment of your starting potential, creating an external image, improving communication skills, possession of the culture of behavior and improving professionalism. There is no doubt that all of these methods are useful, but only leading this recommendation will never make you a good teacher, because they cannot make you become passionate about teaching. It is the thing that you have or do not have, and there is no method to get it (Sidash, 2014).

One of the first Russian specialists in imaging Shepel (1994) identifies three groups of qualities, the possession of which gives a chance to solve the problem of the image. The first group includes such natural qualities as: sociability (the ability to easily converge with people), empathy (the ability to empathize), reflexivity (the ability to understand people), eloquence (the ability to influence with a word). These qualities can be designated conventionally by the concept of "ability and desire to please".

The second group contains personality characteristics as a result of education and upbringing. These include moral values, mental health, possession of a set of human studies technologies (interpersonal communication, a business speech, the ability to overcome conflict situations). The third group should cover what is associated with the life and professional experience of the individual. Intuition and communication situations should be emphasized.

Overconfidence and standard behavior are most often perceived negatively. The formation of a professional image is achieved as a result of the teacher's tremendous work on himself, deliberate exercise in the development of psychological and pedagogical qualities and properties. Such activity achieves the greatest effect in the early stages of the teacher's personal and professional development, in his student years.

Purpose of the Study

Teachers are one of the most important people in everybody’s life and their influence on the formation of each personality cannot be overstated. But teaching at any level is a challenging occupation, and to be a successful teacher a person needs to have special image that will make students listen carefully to things that they want to be taught. The purpose of the article is to show that the teacher (mentor) has to be constantly upgrading and always take additional courses, and engage in self-development.

Carrie Lam from George Lucas educational foundation put gathered eleven qualities that a good teacher should have. These are enjoying teaching, “making the difference” that means to find an individual approach to each student depending on their lives and personal qualities, spreading positivity, doing job as well as possible, staying organized, being open-minded, having standards, finding inspiration, embracing changes and creating reflection (Shrein, 2010).

Research Methods

The form of presentation of the subject plays an important role in terms of the assimilation of knowledge. Thus, a good teacher must understand whether students are listening. If the subject of the conversation is complex and not interesting, the professor can start a new conversation with the students or come up with another interactive format.

Also, do not underestimate the role of humor. Excessive severity is unlikely to attract attention of the audience as much as a good joke, just in time and place (Esipova & Satyvaldieva, 2015). It is very difficult to focus attention for a long time, so a good teacher will always intersperse the material with lyrical digressions, jokes and anecdotes. Due to this, students can relax and remember the lecture better, because now they have an association with something funny.

Self-isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, when students and teachers switched to online education, especially confirmed that successful teachers should be able to interest students in any situation. Through the screen, teachers had to share their energy so that their listeners did not get bored during classes and did not engage in distracting activities. To do this, many lecturers chose different platforms that were more suited to their tasks. For example, they broadcast live on Instagram using various masks and filters, and asked students to respond to their questions and theses with text messages. Or, for example, they unexpectedly connected a student to the conversation.

Here we have only listed how the teacher should teach. However, it is also important that a successful teacher (and mentor) does not think that he or she knows more than students do. As the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger said, — which means teaching others, we learn ourselves. Firstly, it contributes to the fact that teachers develop themselves and learn what they could never learn from books or other “serious” sources. Secondly, in this way teachers communicate with students on an equal footing. When a teacher does not just impose his or her point of view and does not neglect students, but hears and understands, asks questions and knows in general how to involve students in a joint creative process, this is the ideal learning option.

You cannot completely trust students and learn from them if you do not sincerely believe in the abilities of young people. It also seems that a successful mentor should discern the strengths of students, be able to guide them, to nurture them, and to believe in them. A successful mentor cannot be a person who does not help students identify their weaknesses and get rid of them (Arkanova & Trofimova, 2017).

Findings

In the modern world soft skills are becoming one of the main requirements of employers. In 2016, the World Economic Forum in Switzerland named the basic skills that a person of the XXI century needs for a successful career growth (Gray, 2016). Among the top 10 skills there were flexibility, emotional intelligence, creativity, critical thinking and complex problem solving. The forum participants came to the conclusion that today the duties of teachers include not only theoretical training, but also the development of personalities.

Of course, we will not forget to mention that mentors must develop their own soft skills, i.e. must have a high level of empathy and morality (Kharchenko, 2013). They should be principled, but not stubborn, sympathize, but allow students to relax too much. Without respect for students, the ability to empathize with them, to maintain balance and self-control, one cannot become a good teacher.

We also note that the work of a university teacher is not limited only to lectures, seminars and preparations for them. It is equally important to be able to create a healthy psychological atmosphere in the team, not to be afraid of conflicts with and between students, but to be able to resolve them (Lobza, 2020). In this way, the teacher also transfers his or her experience to the students and helps them cope with difficult life situations on their own.

It is interesting that representatives of the profession themselves adhere to the same views on what a modern successful teacher should be. This has been shown in a recent study by sociologists from Tyumen State University. The authors interviewed employees of several universities, asking them one question: “What competencies, in your opinion, should a modern university teacher have in educational and research activities?”

Most experts named such qualities and skills as professionalism, erudition of the teacher, constant self-education and advanced training (Romanenko & Tymoshko, 2019). Professors and associate professors noted that a teacher should be charismatic, be able to “lead” and “kindle hearts”, “become an example”. One of the respondents said that it is important for a teacher to be a good psychologist, since now we are competing with the entertainment sphere and with other aspects of students' lives. This is the only way to get them interested (Efimova et al., 2021).

The ability to adapt not only to the teams of students and staff, but also to the learning environment was considered no less important. This was well shown by the coronavirus pandemic: among the most important qualities that a modern teacher should have, university teachers named mastery of digital competencies and adaptation to a distance education format. Now the mentor must keep up with these changes and be able to adjust the presentation of the material, to make students interested no longer in classrooms, but on the Internet, where their family members, friends, social networks and other sites also compete for their attention.

The student very accurately perceives the teacher through the dominant characteristics of his image, therefore, the professional image is an important competence of each teacher, which is the result of his purposeful work and self-development, and above all, as an expert in the subject area and a qualified teacher. A professional image is a tool of pedagogical influence and a condition for effective and productive educational activities of a modern teacher of higher education.

Completing the work, it is worth concluding that the university is a place where new ideas are tested, research is carried out, and new teaching technologies are developed. Informing the public and openness are becoming priority areas in the work on the image of the university and the image of its teachers. The main components of the educational paradigm that can be formed are: the quality of education, innovation, prestige, openness.

All components are interconnected: the teacher's work on the image is an opportunity to increase competitiveness, attract talented applicants who will become qualified specialists in the future and will work for the development of the state, society, country - this is our road to the future.

Conclusion

Thus, we came to the conclusion about what a successful teacher should have been. Higher education teachers must constantly undergo additional retraining, research how the required skills are changing today and remain a person-example for students who is interesting to listen to and who can be trusted. They must love what they teach and those whom they teach.

References

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• Efimova, G. Z., Sorokin, A. N., & Gribovsky, M. V. (2021). The ideal higher education teacher: personal qualities and socio-p rofessional competences. Education and science, 23(1), 202-230.

• Esipova, A. A., & Satyvaldieva, B. (2015). The image of modern higher education teacher. Pedagogy of high education, 3(1), 75-78.

• Gray, A. (2016). The 10 skills you need to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-10-skills-you-need-to-thrive-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/

• Kharchenko, L. N. (2013). The concept of the training program for teachers of higher education. Direct Media.

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• Shepel, V. M. (1994). Imageology: the secrets of personal charm. Academy.