There's a Plan for That

With the added pressures of standardized testing in the school system, there has also been a subsequent rise in departmentalization in upper elementary classrooms.

If anyone is reading this and has no idea what departmentalization means (as I did as a new teacher), it means that the content areas are divided up between teachers, and the students receive instruction from different teachers for those content areas, rather than just getting all core subject lessons in one classroom with one singular teacher.

One of the great benefits of departmentalizing a grade level is it really allows for intentionality and deeper understanding of content and best practices to take place in the classroom. When I was lesson planning for Math, Reading, Writing, Science, Social Studies, etc., it required so much to plan and prep that oftentimes my lessons remained pretty surface level.

However, when we split so that I was only responsible for math instruction, then I was able to really dig deep into my content area and have lessons that included math labs, investigations, project-based learning, and other exciting things!

Finding out that your school is planning to departmentalize your grade level is a surefire way to bring up ALL the feelings! You may feel excited, or apprehensive, or both at the same time. That’s totally normal!

With all of that being said, one of the biggest fears that I had to tackle was trying to manage and organize for the needs of multiple class periods in one single day. I had finally felt like I was getting the hang of managing one singular class period, so the idea of trying to juggle multiple (in my case, 3) was extraordinarily overwhelming.

Today I want to share all my tips and tricks that I learned along my journey of transitioning from a self-contained classroom to a departmentalized classroom!

First things first, colors have just become your new best friend!

I’ve found that the easiest way to keep my different classes (or cores) straight was to assign each group a color. The important thing to keep in mind is that, for the convenience of the students involved, these colors need to remain consistent for them as they rotate through their day.

My homeroom couldn’t be my blue core inside of my classroom, and then walk into science class where suddenly they were the green core. That’s too confusing, and they will forever remain disorganized in your classroom!

Once you have picked a color for each class, you want to make sure that the items that are specific to that group of kids are in that color.

For those teachers who are just starting out and are buying items from scratch for the first time, this is where you want to get the notebooks and folders and caddies, all in the correlating colors for each core. However, for those of us who are trying to flip existing organizational products and structures to fit the needs of this new change, colored duct tape is the name of the game!

Technically any tape can be used to label the spines of your books and binders. You only need to put a strip around the bottom part of your spine to easily see at a glance which core class that item should belong to. However, in my experience, this is one of those moments that on-brand duct tape is going to be your safest bet.

We know kids, and we know that our kids LOVE to pick at anything set in front of them. The cutesy washi tape or off-brand duct tape is just too prone to being picked off. So don’t be me, learn from my mistakes, invest in the good tape from the get-go, and avoid having to retape things all throughout the year!

The second most important organizational tool is going to be numbers!

Every student in each class needs to have a student number. These numbers need to become ride or die in your class. This doesn’t mean that you don’t know your students’ names, and they’re just a number. But it does mean that your classroom is organized and functions well on the basis of the student numbers.

For example, when I would line my students up, I would call them in number groups of 5 to line up. (“Student numbers 1-5, please line up. Now student numbers 6-10, please line up.) I would also use student numbers when I was passing out papers; I would call students to come up in sections to get the papers to work on. Student numbers were written on all of their textbooks, notebooks, and folders so that if they were ever found laying out and about they could be returned to their correlating cubby number.

Cubbies were a shared space between the different classes, so student number 1 in each core would put their items in cubby number 1 in my classroom. Students weren’t allowed to store loose papers in their cubbies because of this, only textbooks, notebooks, folders, and a whiteboard.

It is important to realize that when these numbers are assigned they need to be permanent. That means if your class size drops or changes, you can’t reassign your students numbers because systems will already be set in place in the other classes using those numbers for those specific students.

One year I had a teammate who reassigned numbers on day 4 of the school year because some students on her roster hadn’t showed up, and I spent the rest of the year with confused kids on whether they were number 5 or really number 3 depending on which classroom they were in. Just don’t do it!

The biggest advantage of student numbers actually ended up being dealing with paperwork. I would have students write their number on top of every paper they turned into me. We actually spend a good portion of time at the beginning of the year drilling this habit in. It’s important that you repeatedly narrate the need to put their numbers on the paper, like we do with student names.

Numbers are assigned based on our rosters, which are generated in alphabetical order, which means having numbers on all of the papers helps when it comes to entering grades. When I’m putting a grade in for Tony who is number 28 I know to automatically look at the end of my grade book, but if I was trying to assign a grade to Sarah who is number 2, I would look at the top of my grade book.

This is also helpful for sorting students’ papers to return home. I would use a Thursday Folder system, where any work or important papers that needed to be sent out to students would be filed into different folders for me to send home to students.

These folders would be labeled by number, and I would keep a roster for each of my classes at my Thursday folder station for any students helping me sort papers to refer to as a guide. It’s also helpful to note that I would create 1 master folder for number 1, and then in it I would have folders labeled number 1 with the different class colors on it. So at a glance as a teacher, I could grab any student’s Thursday Folder quickly.

This was also beneficial when it came to sending these papers to my teammates so they could go home with the students from their homerooms. There is an upcoming blog post about Thursday Folders, and different approaches to this system coming up soon, so make sure to join my email list so you don’t miss that list coming out!

Tip Number 3: A Lunch Bucket

Lunch boxes can be quite the stressor when it comes to students rotating classrooms throughout their day. You have half the class trying to run back into their homeroom class to pick out their lunches, interrupting the class, causing a lot of chaos in managing students. Trying to referee both classroom and hallway behaviors during this transition and do it in a timely manner are overwhelming to say the least. The solution to this is to have a big lunch bucket, like the one below!

Mainstays Flexible 17 Gallon Plastic Tub with Rope Handles, Black – Walmart.com

Having a large 17/18 gallon or bigger multipurpose bin with strong handles was perfect to contain all of the lunches in the morning. I bought a bin similar to the one pictured above from Walmart, though I have seen them at Target and on Amazon as well. (Remember from something of this size buying in person tends to be cheaper than trying to buy it online.) It’s important to note that the key features you’re looking for here are sturdy, and washable. I wouldn’t go with a fabric bin even though they can be very cute, if Suzie’s red juice spills in your fancy bin everyone is going to be sad.

Typically, I would ask two students to carry the bucket with them when they were switching to their next class. At the end of the day, students were responsible for getting their lunchboxes back out of the bin when they packed up to go home. (Having a student who was expected to double-check that the lunch boxes were actually picked up can be helpful in managing this system!).

Tip number 4: Make sure each homeroom has a place to turn in their papers!

In a self-contained classroom, it isn’t a stressor to have a single place for papers to go, or even to have no official place because you know that any papers you find around your room belong to a student in that classroom. When you are departmentalized, however, you have multiple potential homerooms that the papers could belong to, so random papers found around the room have the potential for a much larger headache.

Having predetermined places for papers to be turned in, and easy-to-find labels can make your life much easier. Next week I’ve got a blog post coming that dives deeper into a system to organize your papers in a departmentalized classroom. Go ahead and join my email list if you haven’t already so you don’t miss it when it comes out!

The final tip for today is having students keep their desks empty desk.

Because students are sharing their seating spots between different classes, the expectation is that desks are completely emptied out between class changes. Each student wants to come into the room and sit down with a neat and clean working area. It can be difficult to regulate if students are allowed to leave belongings in their desk.

This also helps cut down on students damaging property that doesn’t belong to them. If a coloring book is left in a desk by core 1, and someone in core 3 finds it and starts to color it, when the original student gets back to their desk they’re upset that someone wrote in their book, and it causes a whole bunch of conflict that is best avoided by the coloring book not being in the desk in the first place.

To wrap it all up, our spark-notes version of this blog includes 5 main strategies to help you rock out departmentalization.

1. Color code each of the classes you are teaching by homeroom.
2. Assign each student a student number, that they use to label all student assignments.
3. Invest in a sturdy lunch bin– thank me later for that one!
4. Plan a specific place for each individual class to turn in their papers, (not just one turn in spot for everyone throughout the day.)
5. Keep student desk’s empty every time students are switching to a new class.

Hopefully, these tips can help relieve some of the stress you may be feeling with the idea of transitioning to a departmentalized classroom. Remember the biggest factor to succeeding is going to be open communication with your teammates. All of these tips and tricks are great, but they only work if you all are on the same page with the plan and have a united front!

If you have any other ideas for departmentalization, or questions, feel free to leave me a comment on this blog. I look forward to hearing from you all!

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