Most business communication courses teach the same core skills — audience awareness, message construction, persuasive strategy — through case studies students read about rather than situations students are actually in. I’ve spent the last several years testing a different premise: that the classroom itself can become the workplace, if you’re willing to design for it rather than just narrate it. That premise is behind BCOM+, a simulated communications consultancy that structures a unit of the business communication course I teach, and it’s the same premise behind a shorter case exercise nested inside it.
The starting question, borrowed loosely from research on simulation-based learning, is whether students’ perception of a simulation’s authenticity predicts how deeply they engage with it and how well what they learn transfers beyond it. Khaled and colleagues found exactly that relationship in their 2015 study of hands-on simulations — authenticity, as students experienced it, was a significant predictor of competency development. Philip Schlechty’s account of engagement points to something similar: the highest tier he describes, “authentic engagement,” depends on students experiencing the work as having immediate, felt meaning, not just instructional value. My design choices are, in effect, an ongoing attempt to build toward that tier rather than assume it.
Building a world, not a worksheet. The first structural decision was to give the simulation a consistent narrative throughline rather than a series of loosely-related prompts. Every assignment in the unit arrives framed as a task from a supervisor — an in-world figure with a name, a role, and a recurring voice — rather than as an instruction from me. That single choice changes the rhetorical situation students are actually solving: they’re not completing an assignment for a grade, they’re responding to a workplace request. James Carey’s distinction between a “transmission” and a “ritual” model of communication is useful here — the goal isn’t to transmit information about business writing, but to create a participatory situation students inhabit and act within.
Sequencing stakes, not just content. Rather than teach concepts and then apply them, I sequence the unit so that each stage raises the stakes of the one before it: teams have to select a real company, build a research base, and only then are they positioned to make a claim I ask them to call a tension — the gap between what a company says about itself and what the evidence suggests is actually true. Everything downstream has to answer that tension specifically. This sequencing is deliberate scaffolding toward transfer: I want the skill of noticing and substantiating a gap in a public narrative to be something students can take with them, not a one-off exercise.
Separating registers on purpose. One structural feature I’m particularly attached to is forcing students to write in two distinct registers within the same document — a neutral, evidence-only mode for describing what’s happening, and a separate, argumentative mode for interpreting what it means. Keeping those registers apart, rather than letting students blend observation and claim from the start, does real pedagogical work: when students blur the two, it’s immediately visible, and that confusion becomes some of the most productive feedback I give all term.
Building in real constraints. Authentic workplace communication is constrained communication — budgets, timelines, existing brand commitments. I bake analogous constraints into every recommendation students propose, which forces prioritization and trade-off reasoning rather than open-ended brainstorming. I’ve extended this logic to how students use AI tools in the drafting process too: rather than treat AI as either forbidden or unrestricted, I built a structured comparison step into the workflow, so that using it well becomes another constrained, rhetorical choice students have to reason through — not a shortcut around the thinking the assignment is meant to develop.
A smaller, compressed case. Alongside the larger project, I use a shorter exercise built around a single, ethically fraught internal email exchange. Where the larger simulation asks students to sustain a role and a set of constraints over weeks, this one compresses the same core demands — audience awareness, register control, separating diagnosis from recommendation — into a single sitting. I’ve found the two work well together: the short case tests whether a skill has actually taken hold before students need to sustain it at scale.
What I keep revising. Every iteration of this unit has taught me something about where the design was doing too much of the students’ thinking for them. I’ve rewritten early scaffolding that I realized was leading students toward a conclusion before their research justified it. I’ve simplified steps that added process without adding learning. And I continue to see students default to shortcuts — with AI tools especially — that the simulation’s structure is explicitly trying to counteract, which tells me the structure still has work to do. None of this is a finished system. It’s a standing test of whether felt authenticity actually changes what students do with what they learn, and each term gives me new evidence to weigh against that question.