In this teaching practice byte (TPB), we talk to Professor Emeritus William G. Griswold about his teaching practice Meet the Professor, where he has short, small-group meetings with every student in his 200+ student course. Bill originally shared this practice as a SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2024 experience report. In our conversation, we discussed how the practice fosters engagement, why group meetings proved better than one-on-one, how such connections are increasingly valuable as AI tools reduce traditional social interactions, and his latest updates and reflections on the practice since his experience report.

In this episode, Dr. Lindsay Jamieson, Teaching Professor and Associate Dean of Teaching Faculty for Northeastern's Khoury College, shares her journey from a small liberal arts college to being Associate Dean of Teaching Faculty. We discuss what teaching-focused careers entail, how to assess positions, and what support and growth look like in these roles. Lindsay offers advice for making career shifts and reminds us that it’s always okay to change course if your current job doesn’t fit.

In this teaching practice byte (TPB), we bring you Professor Andrew Begel to discuss how to support communication for project teams through the lens of supporting our neurodivergent students. We first discuss briefly why there is a greater awareness of neurodiversity. Then we go into how to support student communication within a team setting, regardless of your students' neurotype, since it turns out all students need to be taught how to communicate more effectively! This TPB discusses concrete ways to identify hidden communication activities and how to scaffold them so students aren't guessing and doing them poorly.

Dr. Valerie Taylor from Argonne National Laboratory joins us in this episode to talk about mentoring in academia. Mentoring, at its core, starts with asking questions and seeking advice, as opposed to finding a mentor. In this episode, we discuss the ins and outs of mentoring through Valerie’s many amazing stories from her career, from identifying what questions to ask and how to say no.

Dr. Luther Tychonievich from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shares with us his multi-step Q&A process where he solicits questions from his students to get more diverse questions and strongly signals to them that he wants questions. Dr. Tychonievich goes into detail about how to shorten the exercise if you have less time, as well as considerations and ways to respond to the questions when an answer is not necessarily appropriate.

In this episode, we got to continue talking to Dr. Beth Simon about peer instruction from the prior episode's peer instruction Teaching Practice Byte. Our host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, shares her experience with peer instruction and asks Beth for help to improve. The episode ends with three main takeaways that Kristin has since used in her course.

Peer instruction is a way to move the easy-to-learn content to before lecture, so you can spend more time during lecture on developing understanding. In this teaching practice byte, we talk to Dr. Beth Simon from UC San Diego about peer instruction, what context she's used it in, how she does it, and nuanced details that aren't always discussed when reading about this active learning technique.

In this episode, we have Dr. Barbara Ericson, assistant professor from the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Our topic is Parson's Problems, which are like mixed-up code chunks that students need to put in the correct places. We discuss the research behind them, how she uses them in her class, and her current work investigating how to use Parson's Problems to improve student learning.

Philip Guo, an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, built Python Tutor, which is neither just for Python nor really a tutor. It's actually a tool to visualize what code is doing! In today's episode, he talks about the other programming languages it supports (Java, C, and C++), gives examples of how he uses it, and explains the nuances of when to use it.

In this episode, we talk with Professor Adam Blank, Teaching Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech. Our conversation focuses on college teaching faculty that only have a master's degree by discussing how the job title should be about a person's skills and knowledge, as opposed to the degrees they hold. We start off by defining terms, then move on to what a teaching faculty actually does and needs to know to do the job and how a Ph.D. is a proxy for signals that could be seen with different evidence.

Teaching Practice Byte (TPB): In our first TPB episode we invite Colleen Lewis back to the podcast to talk about her physical models of Java that help her teach students how Java objects work. Colleen was originally on our podcast way back in Season one! We go into detail about what kinds of classes she uses these models in, what the models are, how she uses them, where they would and would not work, and where the idea came from.

We are kicking off season 4 with a deep conversation on academic misconduct with Dr. Oluwakemi Ola from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver Canada, and Dr. Mia Minnes from the University of California, San Diego. This episode was inspired from a panel we were on at the 2023 SIGCSE Technical Symposium called "Who's Cheating Whom: Changing the Narrative Around Academic Misconduct." In this episode, we go into more detail as we discuss how academic misconduct is handled at our respective institutions, how it impacts us, how our thinking about misconduct has changed over time, what we do to teach our students about misconduct, and how the systems around us influence our and the students' decisions around misconduct.

Hello All! This is the CS-Ed Podcast. A podcast where we talk with educators about teaching computer science! We are gearing up for season 4 and we have big plans! First, we've created a Patreon! Yes, that's right, the podcast is moving to become self-sustaining through audience support. If you'd like to keep this podcast ad and sponsor free, please consider becoming a Patreon member. Of course, please only chip in within your financial abilities. Think of it as buying the podcast a coffee or lunch once a month. I try to keep costs down to a minimum, but there are still costs to producing this podcast, even if I'm not paying myself. Your support would be much appreciated. Patreon members will get direct access to me to give feedback on the podcast, and I'll post exclusive content on what's coming up! You can find us at patreon.com/csedpodcast, that's patreon.com/csedpodcast. The link is also in this podcast description and on our website. In addition, mixed in with our usual long-form deep conversations, we are going to bring in a new kind of episode TPB's, teaching practice bytes, that's bytes with a Y! Where I talk with a fellow CS educator about a practice they have in their classroom. And this is where you come in, my dear audience members. If you have or know someone with a good teaching practice, I'd love to hear about it! Please reach out to the podcast's email address at csedpodcast@gmail.com or my own email address at ksm@cs.duke.edu And that's it for now. Please look out for the first episode of season 4 coming out soon. We are talking academic misconduct! Also, consider joining our Patreon at patreon.com/csedpodcast, and please reach out if you've got a good teaching tip or practice you'd like to share. Take care of yourself, and you'll hear from me again in this podcast feed soon.

How do you infuse a class to engage students with socially responsible computing? Kathi Fisler from Brown University discusses Brown’s undergraduate teaching assistant (UTA) program, where they hired UTAs to specifically focus on finding ways to do just that in the classes they were embedded in. In this episode, we talk about the program, how she teaches socially responsible computing in her intro computer science (CS) classes, and how her goal is to get students to ask the right questions. While she also lets go of needing to know the answers or even how to answer the questions.

This episode features Amy Ko et al.'s online book Critically Conscious Computing: Methods for Secondary Education. We discuss with Amy what is in the book, who the book is for, and how educators can use the book in their own teaching. The book focuses on contextualizing the history of computer science and how that history shows that computing is not neutral. In addition, it provides unit sketches to help teachers bring in more design critical conscious discussion into how they teach CS that will hopefully help all of our students better understand how computing affects our world.

Join us in a conversation with Iris Howley from Williams College about Primarily Undergrad Institutions (PUIs). Where we talk about what a PUI is, the research and teaching expectations, what the interview cycle is like, and compare a PUI professor with a teaching track professor. The biggest takeaway from this episode is that PUIs exist, they don't look like the school someone is getting their Ph.D. at, and they are an option post-graduation. More info is at http://bit.ly/cspui-jobs Finally, make sure to check the deadlines soon. They usually interview in the fall!

In this episode, Sarah Heckman from North Carolina State University and our host discuss the Peer Teaching Summit at SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2022. We cover what a peer teacher is, more commonly known as an undergraduate or graduate teaching assistant, and how they support student help-seeking. The summit brought together many people with peer teachers at their schools where they discussed what they can and cannot do, and how every school is unique. Afterward, we focused on office hours and how there was a surprising variety of handling them, including what information students see in the office hour queuing app while they wait in the queue, what information peer teachers see, and the rules the peer teachers use to decide who is pulled off the queue next.

AIICE stands for Alliance for Identity Inclusive Computing Education. It is an organization dedicated to "empowering the next generation of computer scientists by eliminating systemic barriers." This episode is with Dr. Shaundra (Shani) B. Daily, Ph.D., the backbone director of the organization. We discuss how she and her Co-PI, Dr. Nicki Washington, Ph.D., and past podcast guest, wrote the grant that started it all, how we should stop trying to "fix" students, that we should instead focus on fixing the systems that "requires" "fixing" students, and about their 3C program, a professional development program that is part of trying to make systemic change.

In this episode, we talk with Amogh Mannekote, a Ph.D. student at the University of Florida. He and others analyzed class forum data from three very different classes and discovered that a lot of factors influence how students use the class forum, including the kind of class assignments, the accessibility of other sources of help, and how the instructor or TAs answer questions on the class forum. After doing this work, he also strongly believes that instructors should download and analyze their data or we should create more "out of the box" open source tools that do this for instructors. In addition, students need to be encouraged to use the class forum effectively and TAs need explicit instructions on how to interact with students on the class forum.

Here’s episode two of our two-part series on teaching associates! A teaching associate is a teaching support staff position here at Duke University. This episode is a conversation with Yesenia Velasco. We talk about how her role is different than Kate O’Hanlon from our last episode, reflect on how Duke did at its first attempt at such a position, and look towards the future of where such a position can go.