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Showing posts from June, 2023

Management skills, professors need them too

An underlying current in my blog post series on how I manage the teaching staff for my 200+ student CS1 class is that teaching large classes requires management skills. Notice I said skills because I fully believe we can all learn and improve how we manage people. The amount of effort required to learn a particular skill will, of course, vary. But that just means some of these may take work and require conscious effort to learn. Moreover, not all management techniques will work for you and the people you manage. [Also posted on medium .] I will say up front that I have no secret techniques for any of this. Most readers of this blog are also teachers, so you know there are few shortcuts to learning something. And these kinds of professional skills are rarely taught in academic settings, especially in preparation for becoming a professor. So instead, this blog post will focus on first my processes to learn new management ideas, skills, frameworks, and techniques. Then I'll go over s