Welcome to teaching at Wichita State. Stepping into the classroom in a new role can be a little daunting, and the Office of Instructional Resources is here to help. A few things are worth knowing right away.

Your academic department is your first stop. For questions about your course content, running your course, and the daily issues of teaching, start with your department. Graduate teaching assistants should begin with a GTA supervisor or graduate coordinator, then the department chair. Adjunct instructors should lean on their departmental contacts, who are experts in both the field and in teaching.

OIR supports every instructor, regardless of rank. Every program, training session, and opportunity we offer is open="" to you, including the Academic Resources Conference, our help labs, and email support. The Teaching at Wichita State instruction manual is a good place to browse, and you are welcome to join our Facebook group for training announcements and campus updates. To subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Teaching Today, email your name and preferred address to OIR@wichita.edu.

Plan for classroom technology early. Many WSU classrooms keep certain media items locked, and you may need a key and a short media key training before you can use them. Do this before the term starts so you have time to find any adapter or equipment you need to connect your laptop. If you are not sure where to begin, email OIR@wichita.edu.

What kind of GTA are you?

Wichita State has two categories of graduate teaching assistant, and it is common not to know which you are at first.

• Direct Instruction GTAs may serve as the instructor of record. They follow departmental teaching guidelines, lesson plans, or syllabi, and their work can include preparing lectures, assignments, and course materials, monitoring attendance, and preparing and administering assessments. Direct instruction GTAs may be given the authority to assign final grades.
• Assisting (Indirect) GTAs support a faculty member. They may prepare lectures and materials, coordinate recitations, and help with problem-solving or lab sections. They may grade assessments assigned by the instructor, but grading cannot be their only assigned duty.

If you are unsure which category applies to you, your department can tell you.

Establishing authority is hard, and teaching is scary. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not doing you a favor. Most new professors and GTAs receive little training in the nuts and bolts of teaching, so they have to figure it out while in the classroom. Can you borrow a kind of temporary authority before the organic kind takes hold? To an extent, yes. You can practice habits that make real authority possible. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, because authentic authority comes from being the authentic you in your classroom. There is no single path, but there are good maps. Here are three.

Advice from the National Education Association

The National Education Association offers classroom management guidance for K-12 teachers that translates well to the college classroom. According to the NEA, teachers establish authority by:

• Looking the part. Come to class looking like a professional, however your field defines that.
• Forging connections right away. Build genuine connections with students from the moment you meet them. Students take direction more readily from teachers they can bond with.
• Setting clear, high expectations. Students tend to live down to low expectations, so establish a norm of excellence early.
• Picking their battles. Not every classroom conflict can or should be won by the teacher. Respect students' individuality, and recognize that micromanagement and authoritarian rule do not work.
• Finding good role models. Seek out seasoned teachers who can offer guidance along the way.

The theme running through this list is that teachers and students form a community. The teacher is the clear leader, and the relationship between teacher and students is dynamic and important.

A power model

Authority is not the same as power, but the two are related. Schrodt, Witt, and Truman (2007) describe five sources of professor power in the university classroom:

• Reward power. The instructor offers tangible or intangible rewards such as points, grades, or prizes.
• Coercive power. Students face consequences if they do not comply.
• Referent power. The student complies out of a sense of connection with the professor.
• Expert power. The instructor has knowledge and judgment that students trust.
• Legitimate power. Students comply because the instructor, department, or university requires it.

Higher education fits the power model well, so it will feel familiar. Students do what they need to do to earn good grades, recommendations, and jobs.

The voice of experience

Establishing authority is the cornerstone of good classroom management, student satisfaction, and student success. Instructors who run a classroom well tend to have more satisfying careers, students who learn more, and better teaching evaluations. Here is a short list of what helps:

• Buy into it. Believe that authority is legitimate, does not have to be coercive, and leads to the best outcomes for everyone.
• Come prepared. Authority in higher education is inseparable from mastery. Keep learning your field. The books you read years ago are wearing off.
• Learn students' names. This is tough, and there is nothing quite like a name for making contact and for signaling when something is off.
• Set strict rules, then loosen your grip over time. It is easier to ease up after setting a high bar than to raise a bar that started low. Many instructors get this backward.
• Admit ignorance. You will not know everything about your field, or even everything about the day's topic. Admit it, then go learn what you need. If students are engaged enough to ask questions you cannot answer, you owe it to them to find the answers rather than brushing them off. See Imposter syndrome below.
• In online classes, answer questions yourself. Do not leave student questions for other students to field. Answering them yourself keeps information accurate and shows students their needs matter.

In the end, classroom authority comes down to one thing: you must care enough to show up as your genuine self every time you teach. That is tiring, and it is a journey rather than a destination, but the journey is your own.

Do you feel like an imposter, a fraud, a faker, dreading the day your department or your students figure you out? If so, you are not alone. Imposter syndrome is common in academia and is not limited to new professors. Whether you are a first-time GTA or a veteran, the feeling of being out of your depth can wait at the edge of the day to undermine your confidence.

Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first named the "imposter phenomenon" in 1978, and it was initially linked to high achievement. Today it is understood as part of the human condition, though professions that confer authority are especially prone to it. Your students may feel it too. On the days when knowing you are not alone is not quite enough, keep these things in mind.

• Imposter syndrome can be useful. Feeling like a fraud can push you to prepare, and preparation is the key to success in teaching. A little stress can also keep you alert and performing at your cognitive best.
• Imposters learn more, once they get over themselves. We all succeed by stretching to the edge of our ability. If you accept that you sometimes are the imposter, you become more comfortable asking questions, and education is in the business of turning ignorance into knowledge.
• It fades over time. You feel imposter syndrome most sharply around new responsibilities. If you are new to teaching, that feeling will most likely ease as the role becomes familiar. Over a career you will take on many new roles, and the feeling returns and fades each time.

If imposter syndrome starts to affect your ability to do your job, that is the time to seek help. Do not let the fear of being a fraud harm your career. Work to treat the feeling as a tool for getting better. Ninety-four percent of professors believe they are above average, and they cannot all be right. Seeing yourself clearly means committing to improve throughout your career.

Becoming a professor changes your visibility. Once you have taught a few classes, you start running into students everywhere, on campus and off, at the store, at the mall, around town. That raises a real question: where does the job end and private life begin? For professors, being out in public often means being on stage, even away from campus.

Even if you keep every student relationship strictly professional, your public behavior can affect your students' experience and your career. A few things to keep in mind:

• Know and follow your university policies on social relationships with students.
• Remember that you represent the university in public, and especially when you are in university gear. Everyone has rough days, but students may see you even when you do not see them. Represent the university well.
• Keep your personal social media private. You deserve a relaxed personal life, and the public nature of the job means you have to guard it. If you want to connect with students online, consider separate professional accounts, and lock down personal ones so only friends can see them.

These issues grow more important over a career in higher education. Start on the right foot by paying attention to the policies and the responsibilities behind them. Once you step into your first classroom as the professor, part of you stays a professor everywhere you go. That is both an honor and a responsibility. For further reading, see research on faculty and student interpersonal boundaries.

Instructor presence means being there in your class. Whether you teach face to face, online, or both, your ability to stay present has a direct effect on student satisfaction and performance. Everyone has had professors who seemed more present and engaged than the norm. According to Dr. Larry Ragan of Penn State's World Campus, instructor presence has three components: persona, the real you in your class; social, the connections between you and your students; and instructional, the work you do to guide learning. This idea is rooted in the Community of Inquiry model, which holds that learning is constructed and embedded in social interaction.

Presence in the face-to-face classroom

Showing up, delivering a lecture, and leaving rarely builds community. Five ideas to consider:

• Be the host. Try to arrive first and greet students as they come in, especially in the term's early days when students are forming their attachment to the class.
• Be the authority. Know where you are in the syllabus, the calendar, and your last session. Do not rely on students to remind you what you have covered.
• Be the expert. Welcome questions and requests for more, and do not fear stepping off your script. Classroom leadership takes practice.
• Be the liaison. Learn and use students' names. The more you use them, the more students use each other's, and community grows. A seating chart or name tents can help.
• Be the gateway. Show your content's relevance by bringing in real-world and current examples.

Presence in the online classroom

Physical presence is neither sufficient nor necessary for a sense of presence, but teaching online brings special challenges: courses are often asynchronous, often heavy on publisher content and light on your own, often lacking a sense of place, and often serving an age-mixed population. You and your class are your online students' primary connection to the university, so you need to be a real person to them. Start by revisiting the five roles above and adapting them online:

• Be the host. Before the course begins, send a welcome message with the syllabus and tips for success. Post regular announcements that summarize themes, discussion threads, and assignment feedback.
• Be the authority. Set clear expectations, netiquette, and an honest schedule for when you will be in the course and how quickly you will respond and grade. Keep the course space clean and organized.
• Be the expert. Take part in discussions regularly, answer questions yourself, and give complete, prompt, detailed feedback rather than relying on rubrics alone.
• Be the liaison. Help students see connections, praise good ideas and the students who had them, and use names in open="" forums.
• Be the gateway. Share articles and examples that apply course concepts, assuming students want to use what they learn.

Being there online also means being seen showing up. Regular announcements, prompt answers, and personalized feedback all demonstrate presence, and research shows these are the interactions students most want. To become a full human being to your students, share something of yourself. A detailed personal introduction, a brief video for each unit, and a professional social media presence all help students connect the concepts of the course to you as a person.

Whether you teach face to face or online, distractions in the modern classroom can be a real problem. Old challenges like visiting with a neighbor now come alongside a wide array of digital ones, and the device in a student's hand is also a gateway to social media, messages, and AI tools. Managing the classroom means learning to address distractions as they arise.

In the face-to-face classroom

• Begin the term with clear behavioral expectations. You have expectations, and so do students. Consider building classroom norms as a group, with a core you provide and additions from students, then distribute and apply them.
• Do not give first-time passes. Overlooking early transgressions undermines your authority and lowers the bar. If your expectations feel too strict, change them, but once set, enforce them from the start. Move from strict to less strict, never the reverse.
• Consider pen-and-paper notes. The case is less about note quality, which looks increasingly like a myth, and more that a laptop is a window to the world. When you want students focused on class, putting devices away helps.
• Talk to your offenders. Calling a student out can be uncomfortable for everyone. A quiet word after class is often as effective as any public correction.

In the online classroom

• Make your netiquette clear from the start. Behavioral expectations matter just as much online. Keep them clear and easy to find.
• Use zero tolerance for hostile language. Typed comments last longer than spoken ones. Consider a ban on hostile or abusive language, and hide or remove infractions when you see them, even ones you might let pass in person.
• Use private emails and group announcements. A private note to a student who has caused a problem, paired with a general announcement of expectations, is an effective combination.
• Help students make good personal choices. Online students study amid distractions you would never see in a classroom. Offer overt guidance about treating online class time the way they would treat any classroom, especially for students new to online learning.

Finally, remember that part of the problem may be the class itself. If students turn to their phones, ask whether the session has grown dull or repetitive. Students are responsible for their own behavior, and it is still worth thinking about your class as a complete experience.

One of the hardest parts of designing your first course is organizing all the content. Because so much depends on decisions you make early, and because reorganizing later is a real pain, it helps to have a plan from the start. A few principles carry across any tool you use.

• Organize in modules. A module is a unit of content. Rather than pile everything into one place, group content by theme, week, or chapter. Consider organizing into eight modules so a sixteen-week course can convert to an eight-week version without a rebuild. A module might hold an introduction, a schedule, readings, a recorded lecture, a quiz, a discussion, and an assignment.
• Keep navigation clean. Think about how your course menu looks to students. Remove unused items and add only what helps students find their way.
• Limit unnecessary clicking. Notice how often you send students out of the course to reach content or tools. Where you can, keep materials within the course, offer documents in a format students can open="" in place, and avoid asking them to download the same file repeatedly.
• Design so all roads lead home. Give students navigational cues that return them to a central place. When you want a student to reach a particular area, link directly to it rather than expecting them to find it on their own.

No matter what you teach, grading is often the task you like least. Still, students need regular chances to check their progress, and graded work gives them something the classroom usually cannot: individualized feedback. Whether you are a math professor sorting an arithmetic slip from a genuine misunderstanding or a composition professor weighing comma splices against poor organization, a few hard-won habits help.

• Look for patterns, not every error. You cannot teach students everything, and you cannot mark everything they did wrong. Decide what you are looking for, and when a student makes the same mistake ten times, point out a few examples and ask them to find the rest.
• Develop a shorthand and share the key. Your field has its own predictable mistakes. Turning your regular comments into a short code lets you move faster, and the easier commenting is, the more feedback you give.
• Decide deliberately about pencil. A pencil lets you revise comments after seeing several submissions, and it eases disputes, so put the final grade in pen. If students submit in pencil, grade in ink instead so your comments stay legible and cannot be altered.
• Get the full picture first. For subjective work like essays or creative writing, read four or five submissions at random before grading any, so you can spot errors that run across the whole class.
• Give collective feedback. When you find a systematic error, address it to the whole class. You do not have to write the same comment on every paper, which saves time.
• Pace yourself. A stack of grading is daunting, so set aside time each day and stick to it. Ten essays a day for five days beats fifty on Sunday night, and it keeps you fresh and fair.

Generative AI tools are now part of the landscape your students work in, and one of the first design decisions a new instructor faces is what role those tools may play in your course. You set the boundaries. Students cannot follow expectations you have not stated, so the goal is to decide your approach and communicate it clearly.

• Be specific by assignment. Your expectations may differ from one task to the next. What is fine for brainstorming a discussion post may not be appropriate for a take-home exam. Give students guidance for each graded item rather than one vague rule for the whole term.
• Favor clear guidelines over a blanket ban. Telling students exactly what is and is not acceptable, and why, tends to work better than trying to forbid all use everywhere.
• Put it in your syllabus, and revisit it. State your policy in writing, point back to it when you introduce assignments, and update it as tools and your own thinking change.

OIR also has broader guidance on course design in the age of AI, including authentic assessment and proctoring options. If you would like to talk through an approach for your course, email OIR@wichita.edu.

When the same course is taught across different platforms and locations, its quality has to hold up in every version. This is a real accreditation issue, and it is worth understanding early.

Wichita State is accredited through the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), which sets extensive guidelines for university programs. Two points matter most for online, hybrid, and other distance delivery.

First, Criterion 3.A.3 states that "the institution's program quality and learning goals are consistent across all modes of delivery and all locations." Quality and learning goals are listed separately, and both must hold across every version of a course. An online course does not have to use the same methods as its face-to-face equivalent, but it must deliver the same quality.

Second, HLC draws a distinction between distance and correspondence courses. Correspondence courses are largely self-paced, with heavy student-to-content interaction but little student-to-instructor or student-to-student interaction. Distance education courses include regular and substantive interaction between students and the instructor. Wichita State is accredited to offer distance education courses and is not accredited to offer correspondence courses.