Get Organized! 10 "Magic" Tricks for Teachers

By Calvin Hennick 

10 instant organizers and magic tricks from the experts.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could stroll the aisles of your local covenience store and stack your cart high with all the tricks of the teaching trade? In her first year of teaching, Katie Joseph wished for such a simple solution. Daydreams of becoming a baker, carpenter, or postal worker—anything but a teacher—kept her going through grueling 13-hour days (plus weekends) during which she felt like she never finished anything. “I just worked,” Joseph says. “I was shocked at how much time everything took.” Five years later, Joseph is not only still teaching, but she is thriving in her career. It may seem like magic to a newbie, but it’s really just the wisdom of experience. Here, to keep you from sleepless nights and last-minute rushes to Kinko’s, teachers and other education experts offer up a little bit of this “magical” common sense. Follow these rules, and you won’t be wishing you could just vanish from the profession before you start. 

1. Beg, Borrow, and Steal

Joseph says new teachers often waste time crafting all their lessons from scratch. “That’s a big time-sucker,” she says. “Clearly, someone has taught the same standard before.”

Harry K. Wong, coauthor of The First Days of School, agrees. He says it’s more efficient to modify good plans for your own use than to try to brainstorm one engaging activity after another. “It’s really not stealing,” Wong says. “It’s research. It’s learning from each other.”

If your school doesn’t provide a mentor from whom you can “steal,” Wong says you should seek one out on your own. He advises rookies to post signs in the faculty lounge requesting a buddy teacher to help them plan. “I know it sounds kooky, but everybody I’ve talked to has found one or two people on staff willing to help.”

2. Spend Time to Save Time

By setting up classroom routines and procedures at the beginning of the year, teachers can prevent problems down the road, Wong says. “How you come out of the starting blocks will probably determine whether you’re going to win the race.”

Sharon Seikkula, a fourth-grade teacher at Adobe Bluffs Elementary School, in San Diego, says new teachers often underestimate the importance of taking the time to teach procedures for simple things like sharpening pencils and getting a drink of water. “As a brand-new teacher, you just want to get going and get teaching,” Seikkula says. “But if you take the time at the beginning of the year and really teach those procedures, you will get a lot more taught throughout the year.”

3. Get Organized

“The people who are overwhelmed by time are the ones who aren’t organized in the classroom,” says Wong. “It’s not managing your time. It’s managing your job.”

Barry Izsak, a former teacher and past president of the National Association of Professional Organizers, says the first step to an organized classroom is making sure that each item has its own designated spot or “home.”

“The biggest problem for many is that they’ve never created these homes in the first place,” Izsak says. “What results is clutter and chaos."

Teachers should organize all the paper that inevitably comes their way and throw away what they don’t need. “When in doubt, create a file,” Izsak says. “You really can’t have too many files.”

4. Prevent Behavior Issues

“If you can prevent problems, then you won’t have to deal with them,” says Julia G. Thompson, author of First Year Teacher’s Survival Guide. Thompson says that in addition to consistently enforcing rules, teachers need to make sure students are engaged “from the minute they come to class to the minute they leave. If the class is busy and productive, then you have prevented behavior problems,” she says.

According to Wong, the key to managing behavior isn’t discipline, but rather an effectively run classroom. Students, he says, “love routine because it makes the class predictable and no one yells at them.”

5. Use Your Minutes

When you have three free minutes before your next class starts, resist the urge to zone out or just click “refresh” on your e-mail, Thompson says. “In three minutes, you can come up with a great starting exercise for class. You can write a quiz. You can grade some papers.”

6. Delegate

If you’re staying after school for an hour to clean your room, you’re wasting your time, Thompson says. “I never erased the board at the end of the day. Kids would do that. Kids would clean up after themselves. It takes the burden off you, it sets a routine, and it makes the kids feel like they’re part of the class, instead of watching a teacher entertain.”

7. Learn to Say “No”

Principals have a way of talking new teachers into coaching three sports, leading a fund-raising drive, and sponsoring the yearbook club. Thompson says teachers can save themselves a lot of time and stress by having the courage to turn the principal down now and then. “You can say no without being a jerk,” she notes.

8. Avoid Perfection

Dorothy Breininger, a professional organizer who often works with teachers, uses this scenario to illustrate the dangers of perfectionism: “A teacher decides, ‘OK, I’m going to grade these papers. But you know what, I want to get these really cute stickers to put on them.’” That teacher will end up spending the afternoon driving around to half a dozen stores, searching for the perfect stickers, Breininger says. Better just to use the trusty red pen and leave the afternoon open for more important things.

9. Streamline Parent Communication

It’s important to keep parents in the know, but a phone call isn’t always needed, says Cheli Cerra, coauthor of Teacher Talk! Cerra advises teachers to send a behavior chart home with students at the end of each week and have the parents sign it. That way, parents will know if their children have been a little too chatty, and you won’t spend your evenings playing phone tag. The sheet should also include space to request a parent conference, in the case of larger infractions. “E-mail is very good too,” Cerra says. “But I do caution teachers, ‘If you are upset, or if the parent sends you a very angry e-mail, do not e-mail back.’”

10. Grade Smarter

There’s no way to avoid it: Grading papers and tests will eat up hours of your week. But that doesn’t mean you have to live in fear of a growing stack of essays and reports.

Knowing what you’re looking for can speed things up. For example, you should target your grading of writing assignments to check for a few specific things you’ve taught, rather than marking up the entire paper.

Online grading software can also cut down on wasted time, as can the age-old trick of having students grade their own work.

Betsy Brown, a third-grade teacher in Avon, New York, says self-grading helps reinforce her math teaching, along with saving her time. “They can learn from their mistakes,” Brown says. “If I see a lot of marks on the one we just did, I know the subject needs to be retaught.”

11. Get a Life

You may have a million things to do, but there are only 24 hours in a day, and you have to leave school eventually. Sarah Siegel, a seventh-grade English teacher at Boston Collegiate Charter School, says she works more efficiently if she has social plans in the evening, because she knows she has to get as much work done as possible beforehand. “There’s always going to be something, and it’s always going to feel not doable,” Siegel says. “By keeping my sanity, I can be a lot more productive.”