Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

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 ...

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-...

 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 ...

 Generative AI (GenAI) exploded into the academic teaching landscape in 2021, and we have been coping ever since. I’ve been quietly thinking about it since then. I’ve shared resources via my podcast’s social media feeds ( Twitter/X , Facebook , Patreon , YouTube ) and my LinkedIn . But I have not written about it here on my blog nor created a podcast episode focusing on it. [ Also posted on medium. ] I haven’t posted anything about my personal opinion because I wanted to provide an informed one, and I prefer to do my thinking quietly. However, it’s been long enough, and the landscape keeps changing, so I think it’s worth saying something. By posting something, I hope to try to move beyond the initial “what do we do?” conversations. These conversations are the ones I feel like I keep having. And my response/conversation now is often about the same terms and frameworks that I’ve been saying for a while, which often signals to me that it’s time to write a blog post. So here are my cu...