This post is the 3rd installment in my Classroom Minimalism mini-series. Check out the previous posts on creating an intention for streamlining and reducing paper clutter.
You’ve determined your big why for minimizing your space and tackled your paper clutter. The next step in our Classroom Minimalism journey is to trim back a huge source of clutter — curriculum materials. If you’re like me, you have numerous shelves and/or filing cabinets full of resource books, old projects, and lessons. Some of these materials are yours and some are likely things that you inherited because when classrooms change owners, the stuff seems to linger. (When I finally got courageous and looked through the boxes on the top shelf of a previous classroom, I found an original floppy disk containing some math worksheets — they actually used to be “floppy!”) Needless to say, these random curriculum items take up unnecessary space and can hang over our heads as a “someday” project.
Just like with paper clutter, I can’t tell you exactly what you should keep and what you should digitize and/or discard, but I can offer some guidelines that may help to pare down your curriculum materials to only the essential items.
Guideline #1: Relevancy
If you read my paper clutter post, this first guideline will sound familiar. To quickly cut a significant amount of your materials, I recommend asking yourself when you last used an item was. If you used it in the past year or have a specific plan to use it in the next year, you should probably keep it. If you didn’t use it last year and have no plans to use it this year, let it go. (Or digitize it if something about it is particularly compelling.) If an item doesn’t pertain to your specific role, don’t hold onto it a moment longer — things go out of date quickly in education and it simply doesn’t make sense to hold onto most items for a possible transition down the road.
For resources that you know you won’t use or materials that may be useful to someone in a different position, try putting them in a communal spot, like a teachers’ workspace, to see if anyone else can make use of them. When I first transitioned to teaching STEM, I kept a lot of my literacy resources, just in case. After two years in the position, I knew that I would never return to traditional classroom teaching, so I was able to offer the resources to other members of my school staff. Knowing that you’re giving someone else a chance to make use of your items can help motivate you to stop letting them clutter up your storage space.
Guideline #2: Organize Your Materials How You Use Them
Once you’ve identified the items that pass the relevancy test, it’s time to think about how you’ll organize them to make them easy to access. I used to store my STEM curriculum materials by topic — engineering tasks in one spot, computer science lessons in the computer lab, and maker challenges in another cabinet. Within each category, I’d have all of my projects, organized from PK-8th grade. But that system didn’t work for me because it didn’t align with how I teach or plan, which is by grade-level specific projects.
Accordingly, I now organize my materials by grade level (PK-2) and grade level span (3-8). Within each grade level or span, I sort my items by project and then arrange the project materials in the order that I’ll teach them. This makes it quick and easy for me to find the materials that I need when I’m prepping for upcoming projects and to return materials to the proper location once I’m done using them.
Think about how you usually plan and teach your lessons. If you also teach multiple grade levels, my grade level approach might work for you. If you teach one grade level, you might organize your materials by subjects, units, or seasons. The right organization method for you will be the one that allows you to access your materials without needing to think “I know it’s around here somewhere.”
Guideline #3: Let Your Storage Space Set a Limit
Now that you’ve determined how to organize your relevant materials, it’s time to create a storage system to give everything a home. Space can be a challenge in many classrooms, so take a few moments to identify possible spots where you could store your curriculum items together. If you can’t find a spot where you can fit everything together, make sure that spaces you’re identifying can at least accommodate whole categories of your organization plan. Don’t store half of your October materials in one closet and half in another!
Because my school building is only about a decade old, I am fortunate to have many different storage options in my classroom. I opted to use two tall vertical closets to store my curriculum materials, as I like to reserve my shorter cabinets for storing supplies at a level that students can easily access them. Each of these closets has 6 shelves, so I decided to use a shelf for each grade level or grade level span. (For 3rd/4th, 5th/6th, and 7th/8th grades, I teach a 2-year curriculum, so I designated two shelves for each of these grade levels, one for year one and another for year two.) My grade level organization used 10 of the shelves, so I designated the others for holding non-grade specific planning resources and reference materials that I use regularly.
When I started organizing like this, I quickly ran into a problem — for some grade levels, the materials simply wouldn’t fit on the single shelf! Rather than let the stuff spill over into another space, I decided to make the shelf a boundary and challenged myself to find a way to make it fit while remaining functional (AKA not just jamming it all on the shelf!). Though I had already done a relevancy scan, I found I was able to reduce my materials further. Instead of having a binder of materials and a filing bin for each grade level curriculum, I eliminated all of the binders. I also digitized resources that I didn’t need or necessarily use in paper copy. Eventually, I was able to weed my curriculum materials down to what is truly essential and even had space to organize by project on each shelf.
Review Regularly to Avoid Clutter Creep!
Decluttering curriculum materials is a big endeavor, but it pays off by allowing you to easily access what you need right when you need it. Once you go through the process of streamlining your materials, make sure that you continue to scrutinize resources as you use them during the year. Each time I teach a project, I tweak it slightly, so I make sure to keep only the most recent versions — digitally if it at all possible. Without a little periodic sifting, some of those older versions of things can linger and cost us time the next time we go to access that project. As an educator (heck, as a human being!), time can often be in short supply — prioritize efficiency by keeping only what is essential.
File Folder Image by Ulrike Mai from Pixabay
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