To meet the need of teaching faculty in computing and information sciences, many institutions of higher education in North America have been actively seeking and successfully recruiting full-time teaching faculty without requiring PhD While these pathways are becoming more established, there remain significant challenges in preparing, recruiting, and supporting teaching faculty in ways that reflect their unique positions in academia.

As enrollments in computer science courses continue to grow, with many now exceeding several hundred students, the logistics of running such large classes become increasingly complex. Tasks that instructors can complete quickly in small courses become significantly more time-consuming at scale. To address these challenges, our institution established a full-time teaching support staff position responsible for coordinating high-enrollment computer science courses. This experience report primarily documents the first author's experiences over the past three years in this role. Responsibilities include managing course logistics, hiring and supervising teaching assistants, serving as a liaison between students and course staff, and leading student outreach efforts. Shifting these responsibilities to a trained staff member enables instructors to focus more fully on pedagogy. Additionally, because the support staff member works across multiple courses, they are uniquely positioned to promote consistency in instructional policies and practices. This report presents a model for implementing similar roles at other institutions and provides guidance for its adoption.

Decades of research on Peer Instruction (PI) have shown that it improves student engagement, retention, and learning in many fields, including computing. In PI, as defined by Eric Mazur of Harvard, the instructor displays a difficult multiple-choice question during lecture which students first answer individually, then discuss with nearby peers, and then answer individually again. We created a free tool, Peer+, for Peer Instruction and tested it over several semesters at multiple institutions (University of Michigan, Duke University, Virginia Tech, and Berea College) on over 1,000 students. Peer+ is freely available in the open-source ebook platform Runestone Academy. Instructors can use any of the 90+ free ebooks on that platform or use an empty ebook. There are ebooks for Advanced Placement Computer Science, CS1 (Python, Java, and C++), CS2 in C++ and Java, and Discrete Math. We added hundreds of existing PI questions to these ebooks, which instructors can use or they can create their own multiple-choice questions. In this tutorial you will learn best practices for Peer Instruction and gain hands-on experience creating PI assignments, browsing existing PI questions, writing new PI questions, and grading PI assignments. You will also experience PI sessions using three different modes for peer discussion: traditional verbal discussion with nearby peers, text-chat with assigned group members, and text-chat with an LLM for students answering questions after lecture.

In Peer Instruction (PI) an instructor displays a challenging multiple-choice question during lecture that students answer individually, discuss verbally with nearby peers, answer individually again, and finally, the instructor leads a discussion of the question. Peer Instruction typically increases student learning and motivation over traditional lecture. We added a text-chat mode to improve PI for remote synchronous learning. This feature assigns students to discussion groups to maximize the number of groups that have members with different answers. The tool was pilot tested in Winter 2022 and revised. In Fall 2022 and Winter 2023, it was tested at one institution. In Fall 2024, it was tested at four institutions. We conducted a log file analysis of student data from 1394 students and analyzed surveys with 848 student responses. We found that questions answered using the text-chat had a significantly higher improvement than those using traditional verbal discussion, although the two modes were tested with different questions. Interestingly, most of the students preferred to discuss the question verbally, although some preferred the text-chat discussion. These results inform efforts to improve the effectiveness of Peer Instruction and increase its adoption.

In the current socio-political climate, computing educators are facing increasing challenges, including threats to academic freedom, reduced funding for higher education, and direct attacks on initiatives supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion. This special session offers an inclusive forum for collective reflection on these pressures. Through facilitated discussion, participants will explore emerging patterns, share practical strategies for navigating institutional and policy constraints, and surface both shared concerns and context specific differences. The session aims to strengthen community connections and support educators in sustaining inclusive, high quality computing education amid ongoing uncertainty.

Background and Context. Existing works in computing students' help-seeking and resource selection identified an expanding set of important dimensions that students consider when choosing a help resource. However, most works either assume a predefined list of help resources or focus on one specific help resource, while the landscape of help resources evolve at a faster speed.