Learn how Caleb used his experience as an instructional consultant to make sense of his first time back in the classroom after a years-long break.

This academic year, I taught for the first time since 2021. In my time away from teaching, many shifts in education have occurred. In this blog, I share insights and themes from my first year back teaching university students.

Getting Back Into the Groove 

I had previously served as an instructor at Ball State University from 2012-2016. Before this past year I had last taught at a community college based in Tennessee in 2021.  At that time, I was teaching adult learners during the pandemic as we all tried to adjust to using Zoom for the first time. When I returned to Ball State and started to engage with faculty here as an instructional consultant, I quickly realized how much things had changed both in the profession globally and our campus locally during my “gap years.”  

After a few months back, I started teaching a face-to-face, 300-level public speaking course. This experience has helped me understand new challenges we face as educators. What follows are my personal experiences and insights from my classroom.  

Observation One: Canvas is an Extension of the Classroom 

One of the first shifts I noticed was an increase in student expectations related to ensuring our online course site is up to date, comprehensive, and easy to navigate. When I last taught at Ball State, we had not yet adopted Canvas and were using Blackboard. At that time, I used Blackboard mostly as storage for course-related files. I was inspired by my new colleagues, as well as many faculty who took the opportunity of rebuilding in a new LMS to be more innovative with their pages.  

Our faculty have pushed design possibilities forward by employing our Beautiful Canvas (a resource available to Ball State faculty) elements as well as our Course Template. Beautiful Canvas personally allowed me to think about the visual design of a course page and take ownership of how things were displayed. Additionally, our template helped me provide more description for assignments and pages my students were looking for. Below is an example of how these tools improved the introductory assignment in my course. The template pushed me to outline my objectives, instructions and criteria, and Beautiful Canvas elements provided visual design that made it feel like my own.  

Even though the page was detailed, going over the assignments in class often yielded opportunities to elaborate. Early on, I would provide context to the assignment in-person but not immediately update that description on the Canvas course. A pattern emerged where students would often forget what I had said in class, and thus, reverted to the assignment as described on Canvas. I also noticed that students put a lot of focus on the To Do list in Canvas. Questions would arise about an assignment a week ahead of its due date because that is when Canvas put the assignment in their To Do list. I quickly realized that I needed to keep my Canvas page updated to meet these expectations. 

This changed the way I thought about my instruction overall. For most of my teaching career, I have thought about the learning and experience co-created with my students in the physical classroom as the primary level of reality for my class. Anything that happens on the course site in the learning management system (LMS) existed just to reinforce that information. My students had shifted to seeing the course site as their primary way of experiencing the class, putting it on equal or greater footing with what we shared in the moment. This caused me to be more thoughtful about what I said during class, as well as more diligent in updating my Canvas site. 

Observation Two: Students Crave Opportunities to Practice Criticism of Everyday Problems 

In addition to reflecting on how I display content in my course site, I found myself reflecting on the content itself. My course is initially focused on foundational information about presentation design, especially in how we create visual aids with programs like PowerPoint. For the first few weeks of class, I struggled to get students to think about how they could use a different approach from our course texts to make presentations that are more thoughtful and innovative in their visual design. For the first several class periods students were really quiet and seemingly disinterested. I needed to mix things up.  

One Friday afternoon, I shared a PowerPoint presentation I was putting together on my own. I asked my students to give me honest feedback about the design of the presentation I have been working on for my instructional consultant role and assured them there would be no consequences for criticism.  

The room sprung to life.  

My students had feedback for what they didn’t like about the fonts, wording, images, placement, and basically every other aspect of the presentation. I got more engagement that day than the previous three weeks combined.  

When I asked them what they would do to improve the presentation, they got quiet again. One of them said from the back of the room “Well don’t ask us THAT!” I observed they were good at critiquing what they saw. Now, it was my job to help them find and develop the skills that would allow them to turn that criticism into creativity, whether that be by providing others feedback and suggestions, or taking in feedback and suggestions themselves. 

From this experience, I have intuited that our current students are adept at identifying problems they see in the world around them. That said, they may need support developing critical thinking strategies for how they can address those problems as an individual and within their communities. This is consistent with another teacher’s experience of Gen Z students: “They have grown up with everything so high stakes…Part of learning is you fail and you figure out what you did wrong. And you learn how to build off of that” (McMurtie, 2024). I learned that inviting them to start with criticism gave me the initial energy and engagement I was looking for in a low stakes environment. Finding safe ways for learners to focus their larger thoughts is key to activating them.   

Observation Three: Students are Honest About Priorities

A third and final observation involved student attendance. I noticed a larger drop-off in attendance compared to my previous years. Even some of the students who did attend class turned in partially completed assignments. Out of about 40 synchronous sessions over the course of the semester, I could count on one hand the number of days where I had full attendance, despite stated policies in the syllabus. This was frustrating, so I dug deeper to see if I could better understand this pattern of behavior.  

Many of my students were practicing radical honesty with these behaviors. They were opting to tell the truth, even if threatened their perception as a “good student.” One of my student’s incomplete assignments came with a note that said, “I ran out of time and I’m just going to take the L on this one.” Another student came up to me a week before a scheduled speech day and said they wouldn’t be attending, despite not having a reason to be excused. The student had done the math on the point deduction in the syllabus, and decided they were okay with losing the points so they could start their break early.  

At first these experiences with learners felt disrespectful, but then I took some time to reflect. I realized, in their way, my students were being more honest and ethically driven than I expected. Admitting you didn’t complete an assignment was more honest than pretending you sent the wrong file. Owning up to your choice to be absent was better than making up a reason to leave. I’m not celebrating my students’ decisions; however, this cognitive reframing helped me to keep a positive relationship with them. It allowed me to let go of the disrespect and see it as honesty and their changing values in what it means to attend a course. I also realized it was a way of getting feedback on which assignments were and were not valuable to my students. It helped me to see where I could make adjustments to assignments or provide advice about how to stay on track with work.  

Maintaining an Open Mind

Experiencing these challenges firsthand has already improved my larger work of researching and consulting on best teaching practices. It has also allowed me to reflect on my own frustrations with students and reframe them as opportunities to understand them better. I invite you to do the same. What opportunities do you see for better understanding your students? How will you take advantage of those opportunities?  

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