Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

When I learn about an amazing new teaching practice, I often get excited about the wonderful possibilities it offers to improve my students’ learning. However, as I dig into the details, doubts start to creep in. Is this practice possible for me to pull off? How would I do it with my N students? How would I do it if I only see the students M hours per week? At some point, I might give up because I can’t think of a way to make it work, which leads to my last step of self-doubt: “maybe there is a way, but I’m not creative enough or a good enough teacher to think of it.” I have lost count of how many times I have felt this frustration and self-doubt. [ Also posted on Medium. ] When we share teaching ideas, we often omit basic context. That makes them harder to interpret and apply than they should be. Moreover, it places a heavier burden on the recipient of the idea to determine whether they can apply it in their context, because the teaching idea is often shared via one-way media such as ...

When I became an associate professor of the practice, I said yes to almost everything because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. That led to an unsustainable workload that I wrote about here . [ Also posted on Medium. ] In this post, I share a framework I’m developing to help me decide whether to say “yes” to a service request, with the goal of thinking more strategically rather than reactively. I’m writing this for anyone who feels like they are spending too much time on service or feeling overwhelmed by it all. I’m also writing it for current and future me as I navigate these requests. Understand why you have too much service Before using a strategy to better handle service requests, we must know thyself! Use the Five Whys to dig deeper In some ways, the answer to this question seems obvious, because you keep saying “yes.” But we need to dig deeper by using the Five Whys from design thinking. The Five Whys is an iterative process for exploring the causes and effects...

My LLM brainstorming student activity was accepted to SIGCSE TS 2026 's Special Session ACM Generative AI Task Force Special Session: Teaching with Generative AI: Tools You Can Use Today . This special session asked the SIGCSE community to apply to present how they use generative AI (GenAI) in their teaching. Those accepted would then present what they do during the session. [ Also posted on Medium. ] This blog post is a companion piece to my presentation, so that people have more to reference than just my slides . It also includes all the nitty-gritty details people can use and copy-paste. Context But first context, because context matters! This is for my CompSci 216: Everything Data (here is the link to the Spring 2026 offering ; later links will also point to this semester's instance). It is a post-CS2 elective data science course with an average of 111 students over the last five semesters (Spring 2024 to Spring 2026). We are on the 15-week semester system, and it has a 4-...

I became an Associate Professor of the Practice in January 2024. This means academic year (AY) 24–25 was the first time I had to negotiate the service requests and demands of an associate professor. Now that the academic year is over and I spent the last semester digesting the repercussions of those negotiations, I thought I’d write a blog post about it. My hope is that this blog post can serve as a case study on how workload changes when you become an associate. [ Also posted on Medium. ] First, my experience may not be yours, but I think sharing it would be useful to others. It gives you, my reader, a visceral sense of what could happen. Moreover, this blog post is a way for me to better process what happened. It also provides future me with a snapshot of what that first year was like and helps me better imagine the trade-offs and repercussions of my decisions. So this blog post is unlikely to be for everyone, dear reader. But for some of you, let me provide a bit more of a vivid vis...

Spring 2025 was rough for me. I was teaching a new course alongside one of my usual courses, which had over 100 students. On top of that, I was learning the ropes for the spring term responsibilities of my new role as Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in the department. [ Also posted on Medium. ] In one of my lower moments of feeling weighed down by it all, I asked Microsoft Co-Pilot to create an emoji to express it all. This is what I ended up with. And it now lives in a few of my Slack workspaces to give some levity during those moments of overwhelm that never seem to entirely stop happening. That aside, overwhelm is real, and I feel my peers and I are especially prone to it in academia. And a computer science concept that helps me be realistic about what I can actually do is priority heaps. So I thought I’d share in case you also need a useful metaphor, and to ask you all if you have a metaphor of your own that helps when in overwhelm. What’s a priority heap, you ask? It’s...

TLDR: This post is a behind-the-scenes look at a task tracker I’ve developed over years of managing teaching teams (from 3 to 36 teaching assistants). I share examples of the task lists we use each semester, plus templates for modules, exams, and weekly tasks. You’ll also get insight into how I design the tracker to streamline work and support my team. [ Also posted on Medium. ] I’ve written two blog posts about how I track tasks: my to-do lists and my teaching team’s to-do lists . But both are kind of abstract. I write about the things that go into them, but no concrete details. And I did this because I didn’t want to presume others’ contexts. However, that abstractness never fully sat well with me because, when it comes to learning, sometimes concrete examples or case studies are essential. So, this blog post introduces an example course teaching staff task tracker in a Trello board . Screenshot of some of the lists in the Trello board. This post is an experiment to see if peopl...