Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

 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 ...

 When it comes to anyone’s advice on how to run your own course, your “mileage may vary.” So, I thought it would be interesting to revisit my series on how I organize my teaching staff in my 200+ student class . The first post of that series is my most viewed post on Medium. I published that series during the second half of 2020, and times have changed since then (**cough** pandemic **cough**). In addition, I’ve moved on from that introductory computer science (CS1), and I primarily teach an elective data science (DS) course, which has a high variability in enrollment. In this post, I revisit that series from the perspective of what I still do versus do not between my CS1 and DS courses. [ Also posted on medium. ] Current Course’s Context Before I start my comparison, I need to go over how the context is different since it influenced many of the differences between the two courses. My DS class has a semester-long project and no labs/discussions. The class also uses Python, whi...

(I have an updated version of this post as a guest post on Grading for Growth and a post on this blog with implementation details .) I’m going to take a break from my hybrid conference series and write a post about my latest attempt at handling late work. So far, this system is my favorite, and I plan to reuse it almost unchanged this coming semester. I created it to balance the needs of my students, my teaching staff, and myself. The single-line explanation for my late system is I used tokens to empower my students to decide when they’ll turn in late work. But the devil is in the details, and I put a lot of thought into how and why I set things up the way I did. This post will outline the system itself, what the students thought of it, what I thought of it, and my plans on what to do next time. [Also posted on  medium .] The Late Submission Token System This policy applied to the homeworks that were part of the course’s ten modules. They were released as soon as we had them...

A term I made up and have been using for a while is "GPS syndrome." And it turns out that enough people have picked up this term that I feel like I need to post an "official" definition. I most commonly use the metaphor when talking about and with teaching assistants (TAs) that overhelp students. So this blog post is mostly from a google doc I wrote for new TAs for one of their training sessions. Definition " Scaffolding refers to a variety of instructional techniques used to move students progressively toward stronger understanding and, ultimately, greater independence in the learning process. The term itself offers the relevant descriptive metaphor: teachers provide successive levels of temporary support that help students reach higher levels of comprehension and skill acquisition that they would not be able to achieve without assistance. Like physical scaffolding, the supportive strategies are incrementally removed when they are no longer needed, and the...