At the end of my Seminar in Mass Communication Teaching course, I asked students to write a critical reflection about their growth. They considered how their understanding of teaching had changed, identified strengths and weaknesses in the courses they designed, examined important instructional decisions, and described challenges they encountered along the way.
As I read their reflections, it occurred to me that instructors should complete the same exercise.
We often ask students to examine their assumptions, evaluate their performance, and explain what they would do differently. Faculty members should be willing to apply that same standard to themselves. Every semester produces successes, frustrations, surprises, and moments when an instructor realizes that something that seemed clear on the screen was not nearly as clear to the students completing it.
So, after a summer of teaching future college instructors, this is my reflection on what a semester of teaching actually looks like from the faculty side.
Before the Semester: Designing the Experience
A semester begins long before the first class meeting.
Before students arrive, the instructor is reviewing the syllabus, organizing the learning management system, checking links, revising assignments, selecting readings, updating deadlines, and deciding what students should ultimately be able to demonstrate.
This course presented an unusual design challenge. Students were not simply learning about teaching. They were developing their own teaching philosophies, syllabi, course maps, assessments, rubrics, technology plans, modules, and final teaching portfolios.
That meant the course itself needed to model the practices it was teaching.
If I emphasized alignment, the assignments needed to align. If I taught clarity and transparency, my own directions needed to be clear. If I encouraged instructors to create meaningful learning experiences, the course could not become a collection of disconnected assignments about teaching.
One of the semester’s major successes was the overall progression of the work. Students began by exploring faculty roles and their own beliefs about teaching. They then moved into course goals, objectives, syllabi, alignment maps, assessments, rubrics, technology, teaching challenges, and final portfolios.
By the end, they were not simply discussing teaching. They had created tangible evidence that they could begin doing it.
That progression worked. It gave the semester a clear destination, and students could increasingly see how each assignment contributed to the portfolio they would eventually complete.
The Early Weeks: Establishing a Classroom Community
The beginning of a semester is partly about content, but it is also about tone.
Students are trying to determine what kind of instructor you are. They want to know whether the course will be organized, whether questions are welcome, whether assignments will be graded fairly, and whether the person leading the class is genuinely interested in their success.
The instructor is making assessments too.
Who speaks quickly? Who needs more time? Who has teaching experience? Who is entering the subject for the first time? Who is confident? Who may need encouragement before contributing?
This semester included students with very different professional backgrounds and levels of teaching experience. Some had already spent years in classrooms. Others had never taught and were still deciding whether higher education might become part of their future.
That diversity became one of the course’s strengths. Students brought examples from journalism, public relations, marketing, digital media, technology, business, and other professional settings. They also formed connections with one another and developed their own group identity, including the memorable creation of the “Victoria Coalition.”
Those moments matter. They are not distractions from learning. They are part of how a class becomes a learning community rather than a collection of individuals completing the same assignments.
The Middle of the Semester: When the Work Becomes Real
Most semesters have a point when the initial energy wears off and the work becomes more demanding.
For this course, that happened when students moved from describing the type of instructor they hoped to become to designing the actual structures that would support their teaching.
Writing a teaching philosophy can feel inspiring. Constructing a course alignment map is different.
An alignment map forces the instructor to answer harder questions:
What should students be able to do?
How will they demonstrate that learning?
What materials will prepare them?
What activities will provide practice?
Does the technology serve a learning purpose, or is it simply interesting?
Students discovered that course design is not just content sequencing. It requires every major component of the course to work together. An engaging activity is not automatically a useful activity. A polished assignment is not necessarily aligned. A technology tool is not valuable simply because it is popular.
This was also when grading became more complicated.
Giving feedback on early ideas is relatively straightforward. Giving feedback on alignment requires careful attention to whether objectives are measurable, whether assessments operate at the appropriate cognitive level, and whether materials and activities actually prepare students to succeed.
The volume of feedback also increased. Students were building different courses in different disciplines, so there was no single correct model. Each submission required me to enter the student’s course, understand what they were trying to accomplish, and respond within that context.
That is one of the less visible realities of teaching. Grading is not merely assigning points. Done properly, it involves interpreting a student’s intentions, identifying where the work is succeeding, locating the most important opportunity for improvement, and explaining that opportunity in a way the student can use.
The Daily Work Nobody Sees
A course is not maintained only during class meetings.
Much of teaching takes place in small, unremarkable tasks that rarely appear in descriptions of faculty work.
Students send emails asking whether they have interpreted an assignment correctly. Someone cannot access a resource. A link stops working. A due date appears differently in two locations. A student wants clarification about feedback. Another has fallen behind and needs help developing a realistic plan.
The instructor reviews the question, opens the course, checks the instructions, reconstructs how the student encountered the issue, and decides whether the problem belongs to the student, the course, the technology, or some combination of all three.
Sometimes the answer is a short email.
Sometimes the question exposes a flaw that requires revising an assignment, posting an announcement, clarifying expectations for the entire class, or changing the plan for the next meeting.
This semester included an assignment whose instructions were not as clear as they should have been. Students recognized similarities between that assignment and a previous activity and became uncertain about what they were expected to produce. I was traveling and did not see their message quickly enough to resolve the confusion before they completed the work.
That was an instructional failure, even though it was not intentional and did not derail the semester.
It reinforced a simple lesson: the fact that an assignment makes sense to the person who wrote it does not mean it will make sense to the person encountering it for the first time.
The appropriate response is not defensiveness. It is to acknowledge the confusion, determine why it occurred, fix what can be fixed, and prevent the same problem in the future.
Students were learning that revision is part of course design. I was reminded that revision is also part of course delivery.
Teaching While Life Continues
Another reality of faculty work is that the semester does not pause when the instructor’s life becomes complicated.
This summer, I taught one of our live seminar meetings from Paris. Because of the time difference, a class scheduled for the evening in Florida began around midnight for me.
It was not an ideal teaching arrangement. It was, however, a realistic demonstration of what faculty members often do. We prepare around travel, administrative demands, family obligations, professional events, and unexpected interruptions because students still deserve a meaningful learning experience.
The session required more preparation than usual. I needed to ensure the technology worked, organize the activities carefully, anticipate the limitations of teaching at that hour, and remain present for students despite the circumstances.
The class went forward.
That does not mean instructors should glorify overwork or pretend that exhaustion improves teaching. It means that consistency sometimes requires adaptability. The lesson is not that faculty members should always push through. The lesson is that good preparation creates resilience when conditions are less than ideal.
When the Course Does Not Go Exactly as Planned
No semester follows the syllabus perfectly.
A discussion takes longer than anticipated. A concept requires more explanation. A planned activity does not generate the response the instructor expected. Students encounter a technology problem. An assignment needs clarification. A student raises a question that leads the class in a more useful direction than the original plan.
The challenge is knowing what to preserve and what to change.
Instructors can become overly attached to their plans because they invested time in creating them. But the purpose of a lesson plan is to support learning, not to prove that the instructor predicted the evening correctly.
This semester reminded me that structure and flexibility are not opposites.
Students benefit from clear expectations, consistent deadlines, organized modules, and transparent grading. They also benefit from instructors who recognize when the planned approach is not working and are willing to adjust.
The strongest class meetings were not necessarily the ones that followed my notes most precisely. They were the ones in which preparation created enough structure for genuine conversation, questions, and unexpected insights to emerge.
A Major Win: Students Created Work They Can Actually Use
The clearest success of the semester was the quality of the final teaching portfolios.
Students did not end the course with a hypothetical discussion about what teaching might involve. They left with teaching philosophies, sample syllabi, course maps, assessments, rubrics, technology plans, and evidence of their thinking about student engagement, accessibility, academic integrity, and classroom challenges.
Some students entered the course unsure whether they wanted to teach. By the end, several could imagine pursuing adjunct, lecturer, community college, professional practice, coaching, or training roles.
Others already had teaching experience but developed a more sophisticated understanding of whole-course design. They recognized that teaching a strong lesson and designing a coherent course are related but different skills.
One student described learning that a rubric is not only a grading document but also a teaching document. Another realized that technology should solve a learning problem rather than merely make a course appear innovative. Others wrote about balancing accountability with empathy, treating revision as part of teaching rather than evidence of failure, and designing authentic assessments that mirror professional practice.
Those observations demonstrated genuine learning.
The portfolios also gave students something practical to carry forward. They can refine them, add teaching experience, incorporate evaluations and student work when appropriate, and use them when applying for future positions.
That was the goal, and it was achieved.
Another Win: The Class Became a Community
A second major success was the level of connection within the group.
Online and hybrid learning environments do not automatically produce community. Instructors must create opportunities for students to speak, collaborate, share uncertainty, and learn from one another.
The live meetings played an important role. So did peer review, class discussions, and the gradual process of students sharing the courses they were building.
By the end of the semester, students were not only completing their own portfolios. They were interested in seeing what their classmates had created. After grading the final portfolios, I created an optional discussion space where students could share their completed work and continue learning from one another.
That interest in each other’s success is one of the best outcomes a course can produce.
What I Would Improve
The semester was successful, but it was not perfect.
First, I would review the sequence and wording of every assignment again, particularly where two assignments may appear conceptually similar. Students should understand not only what they are being asked to produce but how the new task advances beyond the previous one.
Second, I would continue reducing unnecessary complexity. Teaching future instructors creates a temptation to include every potentially useful topic. But more content does not automatically produce more learning. The course must preserve enough space for students to process, apply, revise, and discuss.
Third, I would look for additional ways to make the portfolio develop even more visibly throughout the semester. Students eventually understood how the pieces fit together, but that connection could be reinforced earlier and more frequently. Each assignment should clearly indicate where it belongs in the final portfolio and what previous work it builds upon.
Fourth, I would build more structured moments for students to pause and recognize their own progress before the end. By the time they submitted their final reflections, many were surprised by how much their thinking had changed. That reflection should occur throughout the course, not only after the primary work has been completed.
Finally, I would continue examining the balance between detailed feedback and student independence. Feedback should help students improve without turning the instructor into a co-author of every artifact. Students need guidance, but they also need space to make decisions, defend those decisions, and develop confidence in their own judgment.
What I Took Away From the Semester
My most important takeaway is that teaching is a continuous cycle of preparation, delivery, observation, response, and revision.
The syllabus is not the course. The Canvas shell is not the course. The assignments are not the course. Even the live meetings are not the entire course.
The course exists in the interaction among all of those elements and the people experiencing them.
Teaching includes planning activities, leading discussions, grading assignments, responding to emails, fixing confusing instructions, encouraging a student who is uncertain, maintaining standards when doing so is uncomfortable, and recognizing when the instructor is the person who needs to make a change.
It requires both confidence and humility.
An instructor must be confident enough to establish expectations, make decisions, evaluate work, and guide the class. The instructor must also be humble enough to acknowledge mistakes, listen carefully, revise the course, and accept that students may experience an assignment differently than intended.
This semester also reaffirmed that students often remember more than the content alone. They remember whether the instructor seemed prepared. They remember whether questions were welcomed. They remember whether feedback helped them improve. They remember whether a difficult moment was handled with calm and respect. They remember whether the classroom felt like a place where they could take intellectual risks.
Students completed the semester by reflecting on the educators they hope to become.
My own reflection is that effective teaching remains unfinished work. That is not a weakness of the profession. It is one of its defining features.
Every semester provides another group of students, another set of circumstances, and another opportunity to become a better instructor than the one who entered the classroom at the beginning.