The Complete Guide to Becoming A Communications Teacher, Postsecondary

Chapter 1: What Does a Communications Teacher, Postsecondary Actually Do?

Imagine you've spent years studying speech, rhetoric, media, and interpersonal communication. Now imagine standing in front of twenty-five undergraduates at 9:40 on a Tuesday morning, trying to convince a student in the back row that the thesis statement in their persuasive speech is too broad. That is the core of this job. A Communications Teacher, Postsecondary (the formal Bureau of Labor Statistics name for a college-level communications instructor) is a professional communicator who teaches others how to communicate in their own lives and careers.

But that single sentence hides the real shape of the work. What you actually do depends on the type of institution that hires you, and the differences are enormous. At a community college, you will likely teach four or five sections of public speaking or an introductory communications course each semester. That means you are in front of a classroom ten to fifteen hours a week, frequently with the same material repeated multiple times. At a large research university, you might teach only two courses per semester, but you are expected to conduct research, publish in academic journals, and sit on university committees. The job title is the same; the day-to-day reality is drastically different.

The one thing that unites every communications teacher, regardless of institution, is that your primary job is to turn students into competent speakers and critical consumers of messages. That sounds abstract. In practice, it looks like this: you lecture on how