Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

 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?...

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...

 While going through my mid-semester survey this semester, I discovered an expert blind spot in myself. One variation of an expert blind spot is where an expert forgets to convey information that is vital for a novice to understand something. In my case, my survey reminded me how important it is to help students connect the dots by explaining why we are doing certain things in class. And one way to do that is by going over the class plan for the day. [ Also posted on Medium. ] So, I thought I’d write this post to remind you all of this little teaching practice. Perhaps you already do this, so here’s a reminder of why. Or, perhaps, you do not, and this is your invitation to try it since it does not take that much time to implement. The Practice: Class Plan for the Day The practice is where you start class by summarizing the plan for that day in a single slide. I do this practice with a slide called “Plan for the week/day” in my large (N = 80–120 students) elective data science ...