Sheikh Ghafoor has over 20 years of teaching experience. He began his teaching career as a lecturer in the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh, where he primarily taught advanced courses in operating systems, computer networks, and systems programming to a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined Tennessee Tech. University, where he currently serves as a professor in the Department of Computer Science. Sheikh has experience teaching a wide range of classes from fundamental subjects, such as introductory programming and data structures, to advanced courses including computer networks and high-performance computing.

Sheikh Ghafoor has helped to promote and advance education within the Computer Science department at Tennesee Tech. Alongside his colleagues, Bill Eberle, Mike Rogers, Ambareen Siraj, and Doug Talbert, Sheikh helped to launch major revisions to the Master's program in the fall of 2009, with his primary contribution being the development of a parallel and distributed computing concentration. In the spring of 2012, with the additional help of Stephen Scott, Sheikh and his colleagues helped create the Ph.D. in Engineering Computer Science Concentration degree program. Later in the fall of 2015, thanks to the continued collaboration with Mike Rogers and Stephen Scott, Sheikh helped to introduce a new Parallel, Distributed, and High-Performance Computing concentration at the undergraduate level.

Sheikh Ghafoor has helped design various courses to better prepare students for future careers in both industry and research sectors. He has developed parallel programming courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels intended to provide hands-on experience working with parallel programming techniques on various computing architectures. He has also helped to develop a graduate-level course with a more theoretical focus on the design and analysis of parallel and distributed algorithms. Additionally, Sheikh has supervised several students through directed/independent studies in a wide range of topics. The following is a list of courses taught by Sheikh Ghafoor while at Tennessee Tech: