Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

 When I first started teaching, I felt like email would never end! In my courses, student emails constantly poured in, and I became hypervigilant about checking my inbox at all hours, including outside business hours and on weekends. I felt like I was the only one between my students and catastrophic learning outcomes. Many years later, I can see how that behavior was unhealthy and that the feeling did not reflect reality, but it was very hard not to fall into that junior teacher trap! [ Also posted on Medium. ] Since then, I have thankfully built much better boundaries and designed a communication system in my courses that results in only a few student emails in my inbox that are very specific to that student’s personal context and no emails related to things like course content, logistics, or policy questions. And this system works for all my courses, from my small 15-student class to my 100+ student class. Moreover, what started as an attempt to improve my efficiency has also ma...

I wrote a guest blog post about my late-token system for homework assignments , where students can spend tokens to submit assignments late without a grade penalty. Each token is worth one day, and students must fill out a form to use tokens. I also use their token usage to identify students who may need more check-ins. [ Also posted on Medium. ] I originally wrote about this system on this blog in 2022 . The guest post describes what I do now in 2026, while this post focuses on how you can implement a late-token system yourself. I recommend the following steps: Decide on a simple set of rules to make it easy to know who should receive a message. Create a form that auto-captures student email addresses. Figure out how you will message students. Figure out how students will know how many tokens they have left. For deciding the rules , my current system is relatively simple. 1 token = 1 day. Students get 7 days, unless I say otherwise. I also give students a 30-minute grace period, but th...

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-...