S4xE12: Meet the Professor (Teaching Practice Byte)
Episode Summary
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.
You can also download this episode directly.
Episode Notes
William G. Griswold. 2024. Experience Report: Meet the Professor - A Large-Course Intervention for Increasing Rapport. In Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (SIGCSE 2024). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 415–421. https://doi.org/10.1145/3626252.3630844
Calendly: https://calendly.com/
Irene Hou, Owen Man, Kate Hamilton, Srishty Muthusekaran, Jeffin Johnykutty, Leili Zadeh, and Stephen MacNeil. 2025. ‘All Roads Lead to ChatGPT’: How Generative AI is Eroding Social Interactions and Student Learning Communities. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (ITiCSE 2025). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 79–85. https://doi.org/10.1145/3724363.3729024
Transcript
[00:00] Kristin: Hello and welcome to the CS-Ed podcast, a podcast where we talk about teaching computer science with computer science educators. I am your host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, an Associate Professor of the Practice at Duke University. Joining me today is Professor Emeritus William G. Griswold in Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. He does research in computer science education, software engineering, and ubiquitous computing. Bill, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
[00:28] Bill: Thanks for having me.
[00:29] Kristin: So today’s episode is a TPB, teaching practice byte. In a single sentence, what would you say is your practice?
[00:36] Bill: My practice is called Meet the Professor. And it’s designed to build rapport with students in a large class through required, short, small-group meetings early in the term.
[00:47] Kristin: Awesome. So, I remember when I pulled up your experience report, so we’ll tell everyone that this is based off of an experience report at SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2024, and I love the title said large class. Otherwise, I would not have picked this up. So give us more context. What is this for? Where can it be used? What classes have you used it for?
[01:09] Bill: OK, so, several years ago, when I was at the time in my late 50s, I was starting to feel like I was losing touch with my class. I was just staring out into a sea of blank faces. This was an upper-division, required software engineering class, required for our majors, but taken by 30-50% students outside our major who are in computing adjacent majors. And I just looked it out in the sea of faces, 200 students, and I just felt that this wasn’t working.
[01:43] Bill: I remember reading about this idea of meeting with every student in the class, and I thought this was a great idea, but how could this possibly work with 200 students that could take hours and hours and hours. But I set about to do this and it took me a lot of time the first time, but through iteration, I came upon a method that I felt was very scalable, and helped me understand where students were coming from and increased what I felt was kind of a better type of engagement with the students.
[02:14] Bill: At this point, I have to take a step back and say that in researching this experience report, I learned that there are actually two definitions for engagement. So one is what we call behavioral engagement, and this is what you and I would typically talk about. Students are paying attention, they come to lecture, they turn in assignments, they study, things like that, behavioral engagement. Students define engagement differently. They defined it emotionally. It’s about how they feel about the professor, how they feel about the course.
[02:44] Bill: And there can’t, there has to be a relationship among these, right? It’s like if, if the students don’t feel emotionally engaged, how are they going to be productively behaviorally engaged? And so although I felt like I was, you know, bending over backwards, so to speak, by meeting with all the students, you know, I felt really, you know, ultimately it was my responsibility to know where these students were coming from so that I could be emotionally engaged. But also I hope that through their increased emotional engagement, I might be able to actually get better behavioral engagement. So I set about doing this and by the way, it’s just an additional motivational point. I survey the students at the end of every term after meeting with all the students and I learned that a third of the students had never spoken to a CS professor at UC San Diego before.
[03:32] Bill: This is an upper division, an upper division class where most of the students have had multiple classes at UC San Diego in computer science already, and yet they’ve never spoken to the professor. So this really, these things that I’m talking about here, the emotional engagement and the, the fact that a third of students had never spoken to a person like me before, tip the balance away from interventions like collecting biographies from all the students, which is something very common. My wife does it in political science. I needed to meet with them face-to-face, I felt. So that’s the context. I had a lot of information there, but I think it was important to set that stage that we’re trying to achieve a behavioral engagement through increased emotional engagement.
[04:23] Kristin: So let’s talk about what the tip itself is, like, what’s the mechanics and logistics of doing all of this?
[04:28] Bill: Right. So, as I said earlier, the idea is to meet with every student in the class. We do this through small group meetings early in the term. And this is what’s advised in the general literature for smaller classes. The question is how to scale this up. And so here’s what I do. The first day of class, I introduced myself to everyone in in lecture, including some personal details about my family and my hobbies, trying to break through that sort of professional, you know, veil, right? And then later in that first lecture, I introduced Meet the Professor itself. And you know, explain what it is, that it’s worth a 0.5% of their course grade. It’s going to be due by the end of the month, which will be 3 weeks from now.
[05:18] Bill: So for that 3 weeks, I schedule about a dozen hours of Meet the Professor meetings. I call it MTP for short. I use Calendly. So it’s 15-minute slots open to 4 students each. And, so I’m really offering just enough time slots in that 3 weeks to schedule everyone. So I’m constraining the supply to make sure those meetings get packed and the students feel the pressure to sign up and not procrastinate. In reality, what happens is I’ll probably get about 80% of the students by that point and then I, oh, I extend the deadline. Please come see me during office hours. Calendly is still open, you know, and I try to pick up everyone else.
[05:59] Bill: So this is important because in an earlier survey, students had complained that they did Meet the Professor too late to be of value to them in the class. So they, they basically asked me to do it this way, right? So these meetings are held in an informal relaxed setting. For me, it’s in the outdoor cafe right outside our computer science building. We live in a warm climate, so even in January, I can be out there many days. And move it inside on a potentially rainy day. And so this, this creates, you know, we’re not in my office, right? The students aren’t, you know, feeling again that those kind of that official professional veil, you know, sort of setting me off from them, right.
[06:46] Bill: And then the meeting proceeds very quickly. We have 15 minutes, and I asked them a short script of questions in round robin fashion. This really keeps things moving because it’s short and it’s round robin, because the second student already knows what the question is from hearing it from the first student. And I start by just saying, “Hey, I’m Bill, you already know me from the first day of lecture. What’s your name?” You know, there’s, you know, a few niceties, and then I say, “So tell me, where are you from? What city are you from?”
[07:17] Bill: Then in the next round, it’s, “How did you discover that computing was for you, that is, that you want to study it more?” And I have to be careful I phrase this because I have a lot of non-majors, so it’s really the topic, not the major. Things like that. And in, in these two questions, in particular, I’m really focusing, I want to make a connection for each answer. So students are from all over our state, they’re from all over the world. Fortunately, like many faculty, I’ve traveled myself, and have lived various places and so I can usually say, oh, you know, yeah, I just was on vacation there a few years ago, really lovely place or you know, if I haven’t been there, we have like say, you know, students from India, for example, I’ve never been to India, oh, India is so beautiful. You know, I hear, I’d love to visit some days just something to kind of build a little bit of a connection.
[08:09] Bill: When it comes to that question of how did you discover that computing was for you, it’s an origin story, and this is a very popular topic in CS, and students really love answering this question, I would say. And some think they’re, you know, oh, I’m the only one who or whatever, and, particularly it’s like, well, you know, actually my first CS class was here at UCSD. I’m like, that’s great. Welcome. I’m so glad, you know, you had a good enough experience that you’re still here. Tell me who you’re, there’s a follow-up question. Tell me who’s your professor? Oh yes, they’re a wonderful professor, whatever it is. So, trying to make some connection there, often it’s maybe there’s a robotics class or something, or, you know, girls who code all sorts of things, right, where they come from, and it’s, it’s amazing how much changed over the years, right? A long time ago it was, oh well, my dad had a computer at home, and you know, it doesn’t go like that anymore. It’s, it’s really remarkable how it’s changed.
[09:14] Bill: So that, that’s the kind of the get-to-know-you questions and then, I go to the question, “Do you have a question for me?” Something about your career, the major, you know, whatever, you know, you want, and I’ve asked students in the prompt for the scheduling the meeting to come prepared with a question. And again, I used to just spring this on them because I want to be spontaneous, but some students said, “Hey, you know what, I couldn’t think of a question on the fly.” I’m like, fair enough, I probably couldn’t either. So now they come prepared with a question. And I, and I try to answer the question as, you know, sort of sincerely and as engagingly as possible. And the most typical question involves, you know, getting an internship or getting a job, they ask, you know, something about the resume, most, most recently it’s about generative AI, not surprisingly, they’re like, is Gen AI coming for my job? And a lot of anxiety about that, and I think it’s really good for them, healthy for them to get those anxieties out there.
[10:16] Kristin: So I have, I have a couple of questions now. Like, one thing I’m wondering is, are you at all caring about what the other students are hearing from the student who’s currently talking?
[10:29] Bill: Yeah, that’s a, that’s that’s a great question and turns out to be very important. So when I first started doing this, I would schedule one person to a slot, and I said, and if you if you’d like, you know, if you’d feel more comfortable, bring a friend or two from the class. The typical meeting size was about 1.5. You know, to two and there were much smaller groups, and there were occasions because I wasn’t forcing the scheduling earlier in the term, you get these kind of pileups at the end of the term and you get larger group meetings. And what I and Joe Politz, who did this with me once noticed is that there was more energy in these larger meetings that the students were nodding and asking each other questions and “that was my question!” And you know, and I was like, oh, OK, and Joe noticed its better if it’s in small groups, right? It’s not just this is, this is not just making lemonade, right? That’s actually better in small groups. And there’s the occasional student who wants me all to themselves and wants to go deep and wants to talk for an hour. But for many students, you know, who are a little bit shyer, they get to hear about other students from the class that have the same questions that they’re, they feel awkward about this or whatever, and then it becomes a normalized experience, right? And plus they get to hear the answer to three other questions, right, typically, they get the, I’m having trouble getting in an internship. Is GenAI going to steal my job, you know, what should I do to get an internship, you know, so now they’ve gotten a lot more information, and it’s taken 15 minutes. But I think it, it, it, there also it shifts the dynamic a little bit in terms of the, maybe the power dynamic isn’t the right word, but it’s more relaxed with 3 or 4 to 5 people total, including me, you know, rather than just 2 people, you know, one-on-one, it can be a little bit intense.
[12:24] Kristin: Yeah, well, it probably is a little bit the power dynamic cause now it’s like 4 on one. They, they, they outnumber you, air quotes, and it’s a little bit easier to, to feel the social cues from, from their peers. I think in the experience report, you hadn’t gotten that far because in in essence, the experience report is a point in time, and it sounds like this has evolved since the experience report?
[12:47] Bill: Right. Right, so late, there is a final section in the experience report, how could MTP be improved? And I basically implemented everything in there. Was exactly what I planned to do. I learned so much, both running it and surveying it, and then thinking really hard about it while writing up the paper. I had to make it coherent. So I came up with these four recommendations of what I would do differently. I did them all, and it’s worked out great, and there are some trade-offs, right, and in particular, it used to take me 20 hours to run Meet the Professor. Now it takes me about 15 hours. Right. It’s a 12 hours at the beginning of the term plus some makeup office hours, but those are office hours anyway, so maybe we could just say 1 dozen hours, a dozen special hours, and again, I’m supposed to be offering office hours anyway. It would have been 6 office hours, I guess, 3 weeks, 2 hours a week. So the fact that it’s 12, it’s, it’s a bonus, you know, 6 hours. 6 hours extra of my time. I find it to be. You know, very much worth it.
[13:54] Kristin: Do you have any other thoughts around where else could it work and where would it not work? Like, I think, I feel like you touched on it a little bit here and there, but like let’s be a little bit more concrete.
[14:03] Bill: Yah, so, it I can say that it’s worked for me in a large, that is a 200-student upper division computer science class for majors. And part of that is that students don’t need my time until later in the term, for example, after the first midterm, and they realize there might be an issue. The student is like, “Professor, I want to talk to you about my midterm.” Well, that’s, you know, 3-4 weeks into the class, so we’re done with Meet the Professor by then. Up till then, students feel like they’re on top of the class, they don’t need my time, and I have a large instructional team who are running labs and all those things as well. So that’s how I can pack things in at the beginning, at a sort of a small penalty to my time.
[14:46] Kristin: Yeah.
[14:47] Bill: I think in a large lower division class, there are two problems. One is the classes might be much larger. I think our classes at UCSD get as large as 400 students. So that’s a lot more instructor time potentially, or you’re running larger meetings, you have to change the script a little bit, and you might have more students who want to come to office hours in week one. Because they get the first homework assignment, and they’re like, “Wow, what’s going on here?” Right. Whereas the upper division students feel like, you know, they have their legs underneath them already. So those, those are, would be some challenges, and where I think you, you might need a different approach. I don’t think meeting with the TAs is necessarily the right way. Students still kind of crave that interaction with the professor.
[15:30] Kristin: Yeah, I, I had an interesting thought where like, there’s this general zeitgeist right now, it feels like we’re office hour usage is going down, like across the board and everywhere. And there’s partially this blame of generative AI, but like, let’s not speculate as to why, but like, there seems to be this trend. And so I’m wondering if a practice like this, actually, there’s more room time to actually do it than there used to be, just because something is replacing the use of office hours time, and so we’re freeing up that time to, in essence, be more human with each other.
[16:08] Bill: That’s, that’s a really great thought, and I’d already experienced the no one should come to my office hours thing. I guess it’s just now it’s finally gotten to everyone else, but you’re right, it does, it does create a kind of room and a distinct purpose. There’s some colleagues of mine in cognitive science here at UCSD, Philip Guo and his student. And they ran an interview study on our CS students. And found that not only did the were the students, depending on AI more, but they were feeling like they couldn’t go talk to people because GenAI and I could answer for them like they should only go to the professor, you know, if they really couldn’t get the answer somewhere else and now they have one more place like that, right?
[16:47] Kristin: Interesting.
[16:48] Bill: It’s really, it’s a really interesting paper and. And so this was, she, the lead author, cited this as a concern. It’s like, wow, what’s happening to our community? You know, we used to all gather in the labs and there would be all this foment, and people would be running around helping each other. Now it’s like crickets and some students in these interviews reported that That they, they’d ask a friend, you know, for help, and said, well, you know, what did GenAI say? And they said the subtext of this to them was, you know, you should go look this up before bothering me. And it’s like, oh, the death of community, right? You know, not to mention that now you’ve sort of just been triggered, right? So, so I think that not only do we have more time for Meet the Professor, but what you’re pointing out and I should have thought of myself is that we have more need for it.
[17:49] Kristin: Yeah, and I think your addition of implementing the four-person group meeting probably helps even more because it adds some of that social interactions and that kind of thing, because, yeah, I, I think I know of this paper, is this the “All Roads Lead to ChatGPT” or something like that? Do you remember what the title was of this paper?
[18:11] Bill: I don’t remember.
[18:12] Kristin: OK. I will double check and I’ll make it I’ll put it in the notes of the podcast episodes
[18:17] Bill: Put it in the notes. yah.
[18:18] Kristin: So, any, any plans for the future besides this thought that we just had about the needs for more community?
[18:25] Bill: Yeah, I mean, and, and you know, thanks for drawing that out. I think now I’m, I’m motivated to go back to my colleagues and say, “You were so nice when I presented this to the department. Now, please go do it”. They like, oh, that’s so cool. It’s like, are you going to do it? You know, I would be interested to see how it could be adapted to an introductory course. You know, there is this element if you’re doing in an upper division class, it’s coming awfully late, you know, with still in this last term, a third of students hadn’t talked to a CS professor at UCSD before. I’m like, and you’re this close to graduating. And then so I think introductory and then related to that is how do students respond to having this happen more than once, you know, do they find it’s like, no, one meeting that was enough. I only had one question, or do the questions keep coming, and you know, students get a lot of their questions answered by our wonderful advising staff, but they can’t answer computer science questions, right? They answer, you can, this course is best before that, you know, that sort of a thing, right? And they really need more interaction with, you know, practitioners.
[19:42] Bill: And I’ll say that, you know, I mean these the comments that students make in the surveys after I run this thing are really, really heartwarming, right? And the recommendation rates are really high, right, but what do they actually say, so again I was interested in this emotional engagement thing, and the paper I framed around rapport, right, that is opening for a future conversation because we have some shared, you know, ground here. But in surveys, they talk about knowing the professor better, they feel that the professor is more approachable, that they’re more comfortable with the professor, and they feel closer to the professor, and those were the top 4 comments. OK. Now these are coded, so you know I’ve had to, you know, change a word here and there to, you know, align the codings, but the 5th comment was already positive. OK, so, they already had a positive attitude about professors or the professor, right, but then it comes back, it continues, cares, nice, and then finally comment number 8, too short, right? So, they, it really works. I mean, it’s a very short intervention. It’s just a few minutes of your time, but it works. And the only other thing I would say is to, is when you’re running this thing is to try to be as conversational as possible without losing track of the time, you know, going too far off script. I mean, if I get a no-show or whatever, I’ll go off script, right? But, you got to kind of, because there are people coming in like 3 minutes, you know, you got to keep it going. So that’s a trade-offs like move it to pace but stay conversational. It gets hard after 100 students.
[21:32] Kristin: I was about to say like any tips or tricks for that part, because like, if you have 200 students after the 100th student, like it does it feel old?
[21:43] Bill: It starts feeling familiar at a minimum, right, because you’re getting the same questions now, but then there are new connections to be made. We’ll have, you know, a student from a remote town in California early in the term. It’s like, wow, you know, we don’t really get many students from rural areas. It’s kind of unfortunate. And then there’ll be another one, “Did you know we have a second student in the class from Ramona?” So it kind of, you know, you keep finding the newness in it and trying to make those connections. But frankly, there are a few students who complain that the meeting was a bit formulaic.
[22:18] Kristin: All right. Well, we are going to be careful about time. So let’s go with too long didn’t listen, TL;DL. Can you give me a rundown of your practice in about 3 minutes or less?
[22:29] Bill: All right, yeah, so. Meet the Professor is a scalable course intervention for improving rapport with students. During the first few weeks of class, students schedule themselves into small group meetings in which the professor asks a couple of get-to-know-you questions, where are you from, and how did you get interested in computing, as well as the instructor answering a question that the students are asked to bring to the meeting. In the actual meeting, the professor tries to make a positive connection to the students’ answers in the interest of building rapport. A third of students report having never spoken to a CS professor before this meeting, despite the context, for me anyway, of being an upper-division class. I think this really highlights the importance of these meetings. I also say that students are overwhelmingly positive about Meet the Professor, both as it was worth their time and they found to be a positive experience, and they recommend that I keep doing it as an instructor. The most common suggestion for improvement would be a longer meeting, and that’s up to you to decide whether you have that time.
[23:43] Kristin: Yeah, with 200 students, I don’t know about that. Thank you so much for joining us, Bill.
[23:20] Bill: All right, well, thanks for having me. I hope I’ve convinced some people to take this up in one form or another and report back. I would love to hear about the experiences in this meeting. I’ve already picked up a couple of ideas that I think I’m going to try. So thank you very much, Kristin.
[23:50] Kristin: Thank you for listening! If you know a colleague who’d enjoy this episode, please share it or post it on social media. It really helps us grow. Want to support the podcast? Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/csedpodcast, shoutout to patrons Daniel Manesh, Kevin Lin, and Daniel Prol for helping to keep the podcast ad-free and supporting production. For past episodes, transcripts, and links, visit csedpodcast.org and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! And otherwise, this was the CS-Ed Podcast. I’m your host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, and our producer is Chris Martinez. And remember, teaching computer science is more than just knowing computer science. I hope you found something useful for your teaching today.