I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful teaching partner who had a year of experience departmentalizing. She gave me a list of tips and tricks to get started and stay structured throughout the year. Here are three ways to organize student work that are stress free.

1.) Designate a place for each class to turn in work – This is such an easy, but highly effective tool. At first I had all of my classes turning work into one location. Then I would have to separate all of the paperwork. It was so time consuming. I eventually got nice deep baskets (from Target of course!) and assigned a basket to each class. I taught two classes of math and science so we called them the “AM group” and the “PM group.” Short and easy.

2.) Color-code your classes – I’m all about binder clips. I really stepped up my paper organization when I started using color-coded binder clips. Because you have more students than the average class that means double the amount of strangler papers that come in. I would grade a set of quizzes and feel a sense of accomplishment. Then the next day I would have 3 students that needed to make up that quiz. It became a chore to find the correct stack to file the make-up work in. I bought binder clips from Amazon. I used blue and pink to separate my two classes.

3.) Designate a place to store paperwork that is graded and ready to go home – Graded work is the liquid gold of the paperwork world. You need to keep those papers safe. There is nothing worse than losing a completed quiz or test. Remember those bins for students to turn their work in? Pick up a few more and use them to store graded work. This will make your grading life so much easier.

These quick ways will help you create your own organized, departmentalized classroom!

The post 3 Ways to Organize Student Work as a Departmentalized Teacher appeared first on Tanya Yero Teaching.