Ideal professors, a challenge in teacher colleges

Abstract

Nowadays there’s an ongoing contest in Mexico “Oposicion para el Servicio Profesional Docente en Mexico”, as a part of the strategies in place based on the “Educative reform”. According to the results of the first contest, professors who obtained the minimum score to be considered ideal made it with barely a score of over 50%. The thought of an ideal professor makes us formulate a series of specific traits, from those that satisfy the basic education system demands; to those developed in training to improve their knowledge, skills, dexterity, attitude, and morals; those who satisfy the needs of certain traits of someone who graduated in specific intellectual skills, control over the contents of teaching, didactical competitions, professional and ethical identity, perception skills and the school’s social environment; to those passing through performance levels suggested by evaluation tools. But, what are the ideas surrounding an ideal professor? What are the traits of an ideal professor in Mexico? Those are the questions that made us realize the difficulty faced in teacher colleges to identify the ideal professor, and this is a big challenge.