Research On The Professional Development Characteristics Of The Older Faculty

Faculty development issues are of significant importance to higher education quality improvement, playing an important role in colleges and universities and the national development strategy. Young teachers get wide attention in the existing research, but older teachers are paid insufficient attention. Combined with the era context, on the basis of understanding the connotation of the "development", we think it meaningful to explore older teachers’professional development characteristics.This study focus on the present situation of older Chinese faculty who are over 55 years old. Closely around the scientific research practice and teaching practice, we divided the older university teachers professional development characteristics of objective and subjective aspects.This study is given priority to quantitative methods, supplemented by qualitative datas. The results of the analysis show that older facultys professional are performing excellently.In terms of objective career development, the older teachers’professional status is higher. Most of them obtained the title of senior title of professional and became graduate tutor especially doctoral tutor. Older teachers’recent professional output performance is better than that of other age groups. Their output of scientific research and teaching output is higher than younger. In nearly three years, older teachers published more journals and books which written by themselves alone. They got more patent numbers, project numbers, and higher funds than other ages. Old teachers is now taking more postgraduate courses and recruiting more graduate students than other faculty group.In the subjective aspect of professional development, older teachers’professional pressure is low, and they have very strong professional confidence and profound affection. They are full of confidence for the teaching and scientific research work, and they have a clear development goal.They love their work, having lower professional utilitarianism, being rich in professional and education spirits.We also discusses the influence factors of older faculty professional development. We didn’t find significant gender differences, but significant discipline differences in the aspect of professional production did occur among older faculty. We then from two aspects of individual and environment to explore the development characteristics of the older faculty, summarizing four views including the physiological, cultural psychology, policy, system and environment. In the end we consider that older teachers can play a better role in the undergraduate course teaching, academic echelon construction, academic discipline and learning atmosphere.