Once, in a classroom during an undergraduate course, a student asked me, “Professor, what do you do for a living?” I was taken aback, because I had never thought that being a professor wasn’t considered a “job” in people’s eyes. So I replied that I work in academic and scientific research, that I awaken dreams and desires in dormant minds, and that I bring about changes in attitudes and behaviors by fostering critical and reflective thinking in people’s daily lives.

I work with people to promote a better and more just future for our country. I am committed to teaching and to students’ learning as part of their academic training at universities, conducting research with the aim of applying it to improve performance and advance education. That is why I am a professor… with rights and responsibilities just like any other professional, because there are challenges to be met.

University professors must stay ahead of the curve and keep up with new market trends: they are specialists in their respective fields of teaching, which is why it is necessary to recognize that teaching—like research and the practice of any profession—requires specific, specialized training, and is not limited merely to holding a bachelor’s degree, or even a master’s or doctoral degree, nor is it limited simply to the practice of a profession.

University professors need to reevaluate their teaching practices; otherwise, they are doomed to extinction—or rather, they may become “professorsauruses” in education, obsolete. Their primary role is to acquire new skills and competencies to apply in their teaching practices. To do this, it is not enough to simply possess a great deal of technical knowledge; university professors must apply their knowledge and expertise in a pedagogically effective manner, becoming facilitators who spark challenges and curiosity in the learning environment.

See also:

• The Facilitation of Learning in Higher Education
• Metacognition and Learning
• How can we restore the balance between technology and people?

In this regard, university professors must be mindful of their roles, both in society at large and within academic communities: they must recognize the need for renewal and updating in the areas of professional training, the curriculum, and learning processes.

Undoubtedly, the greatest challenge for a university professor is to promote learning among their students; therefore, one way to accomplish this task is to understand how their students’ brains learn and retain knowledge, and how contextualized knowledge is updated for professional practice.

Teachers need to be good observers. Their attention to students is essential for understanding their shyness and difficulties when it comes to learning. In this regard, teachers need to be prepared to get to know their students, since each student develops intellectually in a different way.

And this “understanding” would come through neuroscience. Learning is a biological change in the communication between neurons, forming a network of connections that can be evoked and recalled with relative ease and speed. All areas of the brain are involved in the learning process, including the emotional centers. Learning results in the growth or alteration of cells when a cell’s axon receives a sustained action potential triggered by strong stimuli. As a cell receives these strong stimuli, they are passed from one cell to another.

In fact, one cannot fail to mention how important the role of the professor is in higher education—not as a mere conveyor of information (since technology can be quite effective in this regard), but as a mediator between the student and the subject matter, with the role of inspiring students to always want to learn new things.

It is believed that a class centered on the teacher’s speaking and lecturing—with no room for students to express their thoughts, ideas, or even knowledge—can become authoritarian and tedious. In this regard, the university must be prepared to embrace these new changes, providing a space where all social actors involved can use technology to contribute to and collaborate on educational improvement.

To achieve this goal, it is essential that everyone be prepared and equipped to break away from this outdated paradigm in the teaching-learning process. Therefore, teachers must incorporate a variety of visual, textual, playful, and interactive elements into their lesson plans so that more neural connections are formed, thereby ensuring that learning is enjoyable, comprehensive, and well-consolidated.

To ensure the success of this learning process, educators must develop systemic methodologies drawn from various sources so that information is transmitted through neurons multiple times, thereby increasingly forming and strengthening synapses—which can be formed chemically or electrically.

Therefore, this is the challenge facing teachers today: to stimulate students’ memory in order to improve the teaching and learning process, to refine their teaching practices by applying neuroscience, and to understand that this is essential for meeting the needs of this highly diverse generation, which learns in a hypertextual manner.

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