Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

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...

A shared inbox was a tool I started using when I was the hybrid chair of the SIGCSE Technical Symposium. It was extremely useful then, and I have since incorporated it into my teaching processes. So, this blog post covers why I use a shared inbox, considerations when using one, and two case studies of how those considerations played out. [ Also posted on medium. ] Why use a shared inbox? In short, efficiency! If more than one person in a group can respond to an email, the speed of response goes up while no one repeats work. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve seen multiple people get an email and respond simultaneously. Or I’ve been that person who started writing and thankfully didn’t send it before the other person hit send! But there are more efficiency gains than just that! There’s clarity on the context, on who is responsible, and in the email responses themselves. If the entire email thread is in the shared inbox, everyone has access to that context, and no one has to find an...

 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...

I consistently teach over 200 students at a time. Therefore, I heavily rely on autograders and teaching assistants (TAs) to grade everything. I use and love Gradescope. But, like all interfaces, Gradescope is limited in the affordances of how to use it. So I thought I’d write a blog post on the logistics side of how I use Gradescope to manage my grading. This post will cover a mix of small and big effort things I do to handle the logistics of grading homeworks and exams. [Also posted on  medium .] The “Prof. Double Check” rubric For those unfamiliar with Gradescope, it enables hand grading via rubric items that TAs can check off to mark student work. Rubrics help make grading more consistent, and Gradescope automatically handles live rubric updates and multiple TAs grading the same problem. In turn, Gradescope shows summary statistics on these rubrics and allows filtering by a rubric. I take advantage of this feature by adding at the bottom a rubric called “Prof. Double Check,...

 Last semester I started a practice to help me better connect with my teaching assistants (TAs). It worked well enough that I decided to continue it this semester. This practice, I feel, helps me get to know my TAs and helps me notice them as themselves rather than just a part of my teaching staff, for lack of a better way to describe it. This practice takes me 15 minutes a week across my 12 undergrad and grad TAs, so your mileage may vary on how long it takes you. For those with a very different number of TAs, I’d say this scales linearly, but not by adding one minute each week for each TA, see below for details. [Also posted on  medium .] What I do The short answer is I checkin on each TA twice a semester via Slack. It’s a direct message with a mix of general how are things and specific stuff happening at the moment. I also use this weekly time to reflect on all the TAs and note anything I’d like to remember for future reference. The notes are usually good, like how one...