Organisation for the Disorganised Teacher
As a substitute teacher, I got to work with a variety of teachers. Some were incredibly organised, a la Monica Geller from Friends, with everything always in its place and the work always perfectly prepared for me to teach from on their beautifully appointed desks. Others were piled high with workbooks that needed grading, used coffee mugs, and resources from a science lesson taught 4 weeks ago. Most of my colleagues were somewhere in between. For me personally, I liked the idea of being organised but found myself easily drifting towards a sprawling hot mess of clutter that needed sorting at the end of each session. When I got a long term position that required me to move classes multiple times a day, I no longer had a dump and needed to set up some systems to avoid constantly running around the building like a headless chicken.
Find a Filing System that Works For You
There are plenty of approaches out there. All you have to do is hop onto Pinterest, YouTube or TpT and you'll find plenty of systems you can use. This is something that's certainly easier if you have your own classroom base where you can store stuff and set up permanent systems, but it's far from impossible if you're a substitute teacher.
From binders to extensive paper trays, crates to Google Drive, there's probably a system that works for everyone. Obviously, in an ideal world you'll experiment with these until you find your niche during your student teacher course or time as a sub, but it can be done at any point. I tried (and I mean, really tried) using a teacher binder which is a fairly popular approach in the US and increasingly so here in the UK, but I just found it wasn't me and I didn't need to carry around a huge binder around school with me every day. In the end, I took inspiration from Tina Bietler's YouTube Channel. Tina is a former 4th Grade teacher in the US. I simply grabbed a plastic tub, divided it up using file dividers labelled with each day of the week and filled each day's file with all the curriculum and pre-prepared resources I'd need for each lesson. I also placed in a hard copy of the national curriculum and my teacher's books at the backs. Moving around school, I found this worked for me because all I had to do was go to my box in the staffroom in the morning and at lunch and grab all the work in one go, rather than having sheets falling out of my teacher binder. If you'd like to find out more, just head over to her channel and check out her video about her teacher desk.
Refuse Comparison Culture
It's really important to be yourself as a teacher- kids can smell an impostor a mile off and they won't respond positively. Therefore, just be you. It's really easy to follow your favourite teacher bloggers, podcasters and vloggers and think that their learning environment always looks perfect and they're taking on all of these amazing opportunities. Stop. Breathe. We can't all be Pocketful of Primary teachers. The reality is, they're teacher vloggers. Of course they're going to make their learning environments look particularly beautiful. Of course whenever they do their desk tour, it's going to be the cleanest, most organised it's ever been. Of course they're going to put their best image out there. What we don't get to see on their vlog or their Instagram account is the late nights agonising over planning, that lesson that didn't quite go as well as expected or the time they spilt cold coffee all over the paperwork strewn across their desk. Comparison culture is toxic in the classroom; take what you see with a pinch of salt, my own account (learning.coach on Instagram) included. I think Emily Ley sums its up pretty well in how we should treat ourselves - "Grace, not perfection".
Create a Routine
We know how well routine works for our kids. It gives them structure, maintains progress and discipline and gives them a place of security to learn from. So we need to take our own advice here and set up a routine if we think it could be of some benefit. Again, it's a very individualistic thing and what works for one teacher won't necessarily work for you. Some teachers will be up at 5am and in school by 7 getting their classroom set up, preparing resources and doing their grading. Others are night owls who prefer to come in later in the morning and stay until 7pm finishing their marking. Others, at first glance appear other-worldly in the sense of they're some of the last in and first out each day. We aspire to be like them until we learn that they work through lunch and take all of their work home.
Some teachers have kids to get home to whilst others don't. Some teachers are involved in a community activity that means they have to leave early, some have significant others they need to get home to. Some teachers are just morning people. Whatever works for you and your situation in life right now is ok. We're back to comparison culture and it's easy to aspire to the YouTuber who gets up at 5am every morning and claims to be productive all day every day. I am not that person. For me, my daily routine looks like getting into work around 8am, grabbing a coffee and checking everything's ready for the day. I do work into my lunch, but I make the point of giving myself at least 25 minutes to sit down, refresh and chat with my colleagues over lunch. I tend to do more work once the students have left for the day, because otherwise I'll be flustered in the morning. So that's when I decide to do my prep, check over my manipulatives and lesson plans, and check over anything else I need to know for tomorrow. But that's just me.
From one disorganised work in progress to another, I hope that you find this post helpful and that it benefits you.
The Learning Coach
Comments
Post a Comment