241. How to Organize a Classroom Inherited From Another Teacher

Teaching to the TOP

Teaching on the Double

Parenting, Education, Self-improvement, Kids & Family

4.8 • 667 Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Walking into a new classroom only to find it filled with the previous teacher’s leftovers can be overwhelming. In this episode, Bridget and Michelle guide you through a systematic approach to reclaim and organize your new space, turning what could be a daunting task into a manageable project. Perfect for first-year teachers or those moving to a new classroom, this episode provides practical steps to take control of your teaching environment. Episode Highlights: See the space and evaluate:: Begin by evaluating the space. Understand what you've inherited, how the previous teacher organized it, and what might need to go. This first look will help you plan your cleaning and organizing strategy. Ask for clarification: Before throwing anything out, check with administrators or colleagues about what must stay and what can go. Understanding what’s essential and what’s expendable will streamline the entire process. Clear the space: Pull everything out of cabinets and drawers to get a full view of what you have. This step not only helps in sorting but also in cleaning and reorganizing the space effectively. Categorize the items: Dive into categorizing the items into keep, trash, and donate piles. Further organize the 'keep' items based on their utility and relevance to your teaching needs. Disperse the items: Once sorted, strategically place items back into the space. Use bins and labels to create a system that makes sense for your daily teaching activities and maintains organization throughout the year. SUBMIT YOUR TIME SUCKING HURDLE! We want to know what is sucking up all of your time either as a teacher or just a person. Head over to our website and submit your TSH so that you can have a chance to be featured on the podcast! SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW Are you subscribed to our podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today. I don’t want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe to iTunes! Now if you’re feeling extra loving, We would be really grateful if you left us a review over on iTunes, too. Those reviews help other people find our podcast and they’re also fun for us to go in and read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let us know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, hello there, top teachers. We are your host, Bridget Spackman and Michelle Emerson, and we are here to make your life easier by helping you master your time, organization, and productivity as a teacher. So you get the job and you've been handed the key to your classroom. Once you walk in, you realize that every single cabinet is filled with items from a previous teacher. That
0:23.1	excitement you felt walking into your classroom is overcome now with stress, as you need to
0:27.9	figure out, like, where do you even start? In this episode, we're chatting all about organizing
0:33.4	an inherited classroom. But first, let's hear a time-sucking hurdle from Danielle, who says,
0:40.1	planning the layout of my classroom. I am a first year, eighth grade social studies teacher,
0:46.3	bless you, Daniel, and my apartment is now being taken over by all the organizational items and
0:51.8	materials I've accumulated over the past year. I have seen my
0:55.9	classroom, but now I'm trying to plan out the layout and it can get pretty overwhelming.
1:01.3	You guys always have the best tips looking forward to hearing them. Thank you both.
1:06.3	Oh, thanks, Danielle. You know what? I've started seeing online, and I wish I had the opportunity as a teacher to have tried this.
1:17.3	I feel like I would have loved to try it.
1:19.7	Is where they really focus in on just using desks.
1:23.3	Like you just have desks in your classroom, which I, if you've ever followed me on YouTube,
1:28.3	I've always been that teacher that I had tables.
1:30.5	I had like weird layouts.
1:33.0	Like I would take the legs off of some desk to make like lower like desks.
1:37.6	It was a whole thing that I was going through.
1:40.2	However, in the post and things that I've been seeing, teachers will take desks and they create
1:47.3	lots of different layouts depending on the lesson that you're teaching. So if you wanted it to be
1:55.4	more of you're going to be delivering presentations, maybe your students are going to be standing up,
2:00.6	you might just have like rows, right? And they might be more. And Michelle, you're going to have to
2:06.8	help me out with my wording here. Is it like auditorium style where you have maybe like two sections
	...

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