We teachers cannot live without our clipboards. To this day, I cannot teach without a clipboard in hand. It’s like my security blanket; I feel safely wrapped up with my pacing guide, anecdotal notes, and lesson plans.
The challenge, of course, is that clipboards get very full, very messy, very fast—defeating their original purpose altogether!
We recently caught sight of one clipboard that was over an inch thick full of papers. Yowsa!
But we understand how this happens. Students hand you papers, you pick up memos from your mailbox, you forget to file last week’s lesson plans. . . because WHO HAS THE TIME?! This teacher had the wonderful instincts of keeping things all in one place and writing everything down. However, it just got to be too much!
And then you end up flipping through the stack to find the things you need. And you end up scrawling to-do’s, notes, next steps, and phone numbers all on one page at the front.
Today’s Question: How Do I Clean Up My Clipboard?
Today’s Answer: Try a Total Clipboard Makeover.Here are some options to try:
- Get religious about weekly clipboard cleanup. Limit yourself to 10 pages or fewer. Do this during your Weekly Round-Up.
- Buy some dividers and put them INTO your clipboard. Or. . . GASP! Use Post-it Notes to mark-off sections of your clipboard. Company Secret: This is one of three sanctioned uses of Post-its.
- Get rid of the clipboard altogether and shift to a Flexy, an Arc, a binder or something portable with actual sections.
- Attach your Flexy to your clipboard using velcro or rubberbands.
Together Teacher Sharing Question: How do you keep your clipboard functional? Or have you abandoned it altogether?
