Model of academic teachers communication competencies management

Abstract

While several attributes have been used to describe a teacher’s profile, content knowledge and communication skills remain outstanding [1]. Oral communication, the ability to prepare and run interesting presentations, transferring the knowledge and skills in a clear and comprehensive manner is one of the most important competencies that an academic teacher should aquire. In this study, we propose a model of communication competencies management for academic teachers to identify competencies gaps and help make decisions related with training initiatives and development activities. In our study the communication profile of an academic teacher, which can be used to assess verbal and nonverbal skills is examined involving 92 doctoral students who would be future academic teachers at Poznan University of Technology (PUT). To build a profile a questionnaire was created. We use data exploratory steps and undertake data reduction procedures to enable us simplify observations into three key dimensions: non-verbal communication competences, verbal clarity competence and verbal richness competence. We examine these factors for the moderating effect of the source of evaluation (students assessment versus expert assessment) and find that whereas assess-ments tend to be consistent across student and expert evaluators, student eval-uators tend to be more generous in their judgement than expert evaluators