Teacher Organization: It’s Possible with These Strategies

Picture this: the teacher down the hall has an emergency, so you go into her classroom to make sure it’s sub-ready. There are papers everywhere, and you can’t tell which ones are for the day’s lesson. There’s not a Post-It or paper clip in sight. The only pen you can find is a red Bic pen with no cap. A literal hair tumbleweed drifts by.

Are you cringing in recognition, or are you shuddering in horror? (The red Bic pen really is the stuff of nightmares.)

If we made a list of our best qualities, teacher organization would be near the top. Back-to-school sales at Target were the only intrusion into our summers that we tolerated. Kate could often be found vacuuming her classroom at the end of a particularly frustrating day. Steph’s relationship with the district print shop was legendary. Even our students, tough to impress, recognized our mastery of teacher organization.

Most of us start the school year with good intentions when it comes to teacher organization. But with 200 students and an unreasonable list of daily demands, the paper (literal or digital) accumulates quickly, and if we’re not proactive, we can find ourselves drowning in the chaos by the end of September.

But teacher organization is possible for all of us, even if you’re not a Home Edit devotee. And taking a few simple steps to up your teacher organization game can have surprisingly large impacts on your peace of mind.

Buckle in for a roundup of our best teacher organization tips and tricks. Spoiler: there are lots of Post-Its and not a Bic pen in sight!

Teacher Organization Tip #1: Get the Right Supplies

Step one in becoming an organized teacher is gathering your supplies. Now, this isn’t all the supplies you’ll need for the year, but it is, let’s say, a starter kit for transforming chaos to order.

We’ll admit: we bought many of these supplies out of our own pocket, which, philosophically, is ridiculous and completely unfair. School districts are notorious for providing the bare minimum when it comes to supplies, and they should do better. For us, it was worth it, but you can also probably scrounge up a few of these things in your school’s workroom or request them when your department places an annual order of supplies. Interested in our preferred brands? You can find links here.

Replace your paper clips and rubber bands with binder clips.

Once Kate introduced Steph to a good binder clip, there was no going back. Paper clips are fine (except for the little ones, which might as well be the unloved pennies of the paper clip world), but they have a way of working themselves free, leaving piles of ungraded papers strewn across the backseat of your car.

And rubber bands are unreliable, too: if your pile’s too small, the rubber band rolls them; if your pile’s too big, the rubber band up and snaps one day.

Binder clips keep your to-be-graded pile neatly organized and are sturdy enough to survive the daily work-to-home-to-work transport.

Create a “teacher binder” for yourself.

At the beginning of each year, we set up our teacher binder. We used dividers to create sections for each class period, and within each one, we included attendance records, grades, seating charts, and copies of students’ IEPs.

Why grades? We’re big on recording student scores on a paper roster and then quickly entering them from the roster, neatly organized in alphabetical order. This is especially handy when you’re grading digital work: you don’t have to keep switching tabs. Record your grades, then switch over to your gradebook and enter them. It’s also nice to have a paper back-up of individual assignment grades. We all know that technology is both a blessing and a curse, and that paper record might just save your sanity one day if you’re the unlucky teacher whose digital gradebook records up and vanish.

We always used dividers with a pocket in them. When a student was absent, we slid any handouts, quizzes to be made up, or work to be passed back in the pocket so we’d remember to give it to them the next day.

Use half-size binders to hold student records.

Our school discipline system relied on the use of 8.5” x 5.5” cards we had to keep track of for every student. We started keeping them in mini binders, which we filled with sheet protectors (one per student) that we labeled with a sticky tab. This made the records much easier to manage, and it would work nicely for any sort of paperwork you’re expected to keep for students.

Folders are your friends.

Use folders for everything: email, file cabinets, desk drawers, Google Drive, computer desktop, everything.

Folders keep things together and give you a place to put things so you don’t have to rifle through them in a frantic search.

We liked to have a folder in our email inbox for parent communication (you save all your parent emails, right?). Steph read an organization book that recommended creating a folder called @Waiting. The @ symbol puts it at the top of the list of folders for easy access, and it’s a great way to get things out of your inbox that you know you’ll need in the future but don’t need at the moment. (We’re big fans of an empty inbox.)

Definitely have an answer key folder for each class. We’re big believers in doing assignments ourselves first, and we learned quickly that storing our notes in a folder saved us lots of prep time in future years.

Consider keeping a crate at the front of the classroom with hanging file folders where you place extra handouts. It keeps your front table neat while making it quick and easy to get students the papers they need.

And when it comes to your digital files, have a consistent method for organizing files so you can find what you need quickly: we always made a folder for each course prep each year, which allowed us to have access to old and revised versions of files. We also recommend putting the most important word(s) first so the files are easy to find when you’re looking in your folder (for example, Ch. 10–12 TKAM GRQ is going to be quicker to find than if you’ve labeled all your files TKAM ______).  (If you have an LMS, consider your students when you’re naming your files: you want it to be easy for them to find what they need as well.)

Have a teacher planner and a place for to-do lists.

You can go big here, purchasing a gorgeous teacher planner from your office supply store of choice. Or you can go free and download our handy-dandy teacher calendar (we even wrote a blog with tips on using it effectively). Kate loved a big desktop calendar for easy reference. For lesson planning, we loved a good-old-fashioned spreadsheet. Whatever you use, it’s helpful to have a place to record important school dates, see your lesson plans at a glance, and record your lists of what needs to be done that day, week, or month.

When it comes to to-do lists, we’ve tried it all: Post-It notes are a classic, adorable to-do lists make our hearts sing, and Steph’s a fan of a tried-and-true spiral notebook for the year.

Keep cleaning supplies in your classroom.

Is cleaning your classroom your job? Well, no. But the ability to run a Lysol wipe or a duster over things and easy access to a roll of paper towels can really bring a little pocket of calm to your day or save you from losing your mind when a student spills Gatorade. Having our own stash of cleaning supplies came to the rescue more times than we could count (even if you don’t go as far as purchasing your own vacuum for the hair tumbleweeds like Kate did).

Teacher Organization Tip #2: Set Up Your Physical Classroom

Have a place for everything.

Not only do you want to have a place for everything that makes sense to you, but you want it to make sense to your students. If your students know where to find extra supplies, tissues, classroom library books, old handouts, they won’t ask you every. single. time.

If you have different supplies or classroom libraries for different classes, make sure you’ve labeled them clearly. The more students can navigate the classroom without you, the more smoothly the day will run for all of you.

Have a different design aesthetic for each class.

Kate created different daily agenda templates and Canvas home pages for each course we taught (not period—that would be crazy). When you’re going back and forth between multiple preps all day, it’s helpful to see at a glance which course you’re dealing with.

Not a morning person? Lay everything out for the next day before you leave.

We are not morning people. We could frequently be seen hustling up the hallway with seconds to spare before the bell (or, cringe, seconds after the bell).

But we knew this about ourselves, and we planned accordingly. We didn’t leave school each day without laying out the handouts we’d need for the next day and making sure our boards were ready (before we switched to a digital agenda). Knowing you can walk right in and start teaching sets you up for a smooth start, no matter when you arrive.

Use sticky notes when collecting multiple assignments.

Whenever we had an “end of the unit” deadline when students had to turn in multiple assignments, we’d use sticky notes to show students where to submit each assignment. When we gave a test, we’d use the sticky notes to label the exact spot on our front table where we wanted students to turn in the test, answer sheet, Version A, Version B, etc.

Did students always follow the labels? Of course not (don’t get us started). But organizing the work into piles as it gets turned in saves us time and keeps you from losing student assignments to the wrong pile.

Teacher Organization Tip #3: Pay Attention to Planning and Timing

Plan your year (definitely your unit) in advance.

We’re all about planning here at Three Heads. Having a rough idea of what you’re doing each week helps ensure you get through everything and don’t wind up scrambling to finish a book at the end of the semester. Writing down all the important dates (assemblies, holidays, testing windows, modified days, etc.) immediately when you get them prevents last-minute scheduling panic.

Establish a daily and/or weekly routine.

Students tend to benefit from routine, from knowing what to expect when they come into our rooms each day, and when they get used to that routine, they get settled down and ready to work much more quickly. Surprisingly, many students actually told us they liked this. They may not have liked the activities themselves, but they did like always knowing what to expect.

Whether it’s just your bellringers, an independent reading day, or a posted weekly schedule, consider following a regular routine. It makes planning easier, too!

Have a system for making notes about what doesn’t work.

We’re constantly revising our materials to make them better, but we often don’t have time to make the revisions on the spot. We started leaving notes in our files about what needed to change the next year so that we’d see them when we opened up the file and remember what the problem was. If the problem was with a handout or an answer key, we left a comment on the file itself. If the problem was bigger (or had to do with timing), we left a note in our planning spreadsheet margins.

It was a quick and easy way to remind ourselves what didn’t work instead of running up against the same problem every year because we forgot.

Use sticky notes liberally when you have a sub.

We have plenty of thoughts on preparing for a substitute, but one of our go-to strategies was labeling everything with Post-It notes. We wanted to make sure it was clear exactly which handouts were for which class, where the referral forms and seating charts were, and even where students should turn in work. There’s nothing like a hot pink square to help a sub find your carefully detailed plans for the day.

Use timers.

Whether you use your phone, an old-school kitchen timer, or a YouTube timer you display at the front of the classroom for students to see, use timers frequently. It’s so easy to get caught up in our own work or helping a student that we don’t realize we’ve given students way too long to complete what was meant to be a quick task. Or we’ve given students too much time to complete a task, and they’ve wasted it all because they didn’t feel a sense of urgency.

Whenever we wanted students to respond to a quick write, share an observation with a partner, or write the next sentence as we guided them through their essay, we set a timer so they would know to get right to work and we would keep things moving throughout the class period.

Teacher Organization Tip #4: Use Technology Intentionally

Make your LMS user-friendly.

Taking the time to set up your LMS in a way that students can navigate without your guidance will pay dividends for your sanity. When students know exactly where to find assignments, due dates, and resources, they’re more likely to keep up with assignments and to do so without constantly asking you the same questions over and over.

When we used Canvas, our home page had a few simple buttons that took students to their weekly agenda page. Instead of creating modules for each unit, we just put all the links for that week directly on the weekly agenda page. With two clicks, students could find everything they needed.

Google Classroom gives you the option to move a post to the top of the stream. Steph uses this for her online AP Seminar and AP Research classes: she creates a Google Doc that has the schedule for the semester (with links to assignments and resources), and then leaves it at the top of the stream for students to find quickly.

Leave a separate browser window open for each course you teach.

Instead of getting lost in a sea of tabs or having to reopen everything each period, open a separate browser window for each course that has all the tabs you’ll need for that class on that day. You can switch browser windows as your students cycle through your room, and everything will be ready and waiting for you.

Use attendance and participation apps.

There are many options when it comes to apps you can download for tracking attendance and participation. They’re constantly changing, so you’ll want to check out a few and see which one you like best, but these are a great way to create and store seating charts, record attendance with a few taps, and track classroom participation (most even allow you to select students randomly).

These apps work best if your school provides access to an iPad, but in a pinch, your phone will work, too.

Successful teacher organization strategies require a bit of prep work at the beginning of the year, but making the time to set yourself up for success can really pay off as the school year gets going and chaos builds. Even if you only implement one new strategy at a time, we’re confident that all of us—from the organizational experts to the organizationally-challenged—can make things run just a little bit smoother this week.

Interested in hearing more? We talked about this topic on our podcast.