Hiring teaching faculty lacks strong community norms, creating a heavy burden on candidates and costs for departments. In this episode, we talk with Michael Hilton from Carnegie Mellon University about a Computing Research Association (CRA) memo he co-authored called Best Practices for Hiring Teaching Faculty in Research Computing Departments. We discuss the practical consequences of this lack of norms, how departments can make hiring better for candidates so they can put their best foot forward, and how to better assess candidates. While the memo is full of useful guidance, this episode adds nuance and stories to make teaching-faculty hiring better for all of us.

In this teaching practice byte (TPB), Dr. Brian Harrington discusses his SIGCSE Techincal Symposium 2025 paper on Literature Mapping, a scaffolded, scalable, low-overhead way to introduce undergraduate students to research and bootstrap a student research group. We discuss how literature mapping helps students practice reading many papers in progressively more depth. His process assigns each paper to two different students, builds in flexibility for students who leave partway through, and culminates in a publishable artifact that students can be proud of. Moreover, he has found this helps him build a community that goes beyond the students graduating. Dr. Harrington has packaged up his process into a GitHub Repository and would love for anyone to adapt what he does to their own school.

Students are increasingly using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in their learning. But what are the implications of this? In this episode, we are joined by Irene Ho, PhD student at UC San Diego in the Design lab, to talk about her recent research, which draws on interviews with students across multiple universities. We discuss GenAI's impact on how students seek help and how it affects students’ social ties, sense of belonging, and views of peers. We also cover practical strategies instructors can try and things to rethink now that we can't put GenAI back in the box.

All students seek help, but what is academic help-seeking actually? In this episode, we are joined by Shao-Heng Ko, Ph.D. candidate at Duke University and our host's advisee, to talk about all things student help-seeking. Shao-Heng explains help-seeking as a metacognitive process and introduces a framework for understanding the many ways students look for help—from classmates and discussion forums to office hours and generative AI. We discuss what students value most (spoiler: timeliness), how instructors can audit their own help ecosystems, and how different student groups navigate these resources.

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.