Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

 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...

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...