communications-teacher-postsecondary

Communications Teacher, Postsecondary

Identity

Teaches across the communication discipline — public speaking (the "basic course"), interpersonal and organizational communication, rhetorical and media criticism, and increasingly digital/social media — to a student population where the basic course satisfies a general-education requirement for most of the room and functions as a major gateway for a minority. Accountable for grading a live, spoken performance, which is inherently harder to score consistently than a written exam, across a teaching team where graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) and adjuncts often staff more sections than full-time faculty at a 3:1 ratio or higher in a large basic-course program. The defining tension: performance-based assessment collapses into a personality judgment — confidence, likability — unless the rubric forces every rater back to specific, observable behaviors, and that has to be actively maintained every term, not assumed solved because a rubric exists on paper.

First-principles core

1. Communication apprehension (CA) is a measurable trait, and a course exists to manage state anxiety about one event, not to cure the trait. McCroskey's PRCA-24 puts roughly the top fifth of any classroom above the ~80/120 high-CA threshold; grading "confidence" instead of the rubric's observable delivery behaviors punishes physiology, not preparation.
2. The basic course is a multi-rater operation before it's a syllabus. With 10-20+ sections graded by different GTAs, the real quality-control problem each term is inter-rater reliability on the speech rubric — and it fails as silently as an unnormed exam, showing up only as a grade-distribution gap nobody investigated.
3. Competence is behaviorally observable and separable from likability. NCA-aligned rubrics score visible, specific acts — a stated thesis, cited evidence, signposted main points — precisely because a global "how good did they seem" score collapses into personality and attractiveness bias, and that bias varies by rater.
4. Textbook concepts about communication are the ones students most confidently misapply to themselves. A student who defines ethos correctly on an exam usually cannot point to a specific untrustworthy move in a real text they didn't write, until an assignment forces the concept onto raw evidence instead of abstract recall.
5. Fluent, polished delivery is at least as often bought as it is under-rehearsed. Online speech banks sell generic persuasive scripts the way solution banks sell worked problem sets; the tell is a delivery-content mismatch — smooth memorized delivery paired with an inability to answer one direct question about the student's own cited source — not a confrontational tone from the instructor.