7 Tips for Organising a Teacher's Desk

Are you finding that your desk is becoming more of a dumping ground for you and your students? I found when I was teaching having an organised workspace helped my mind feel more organised too! Which in turn made me feel a lot calmer and ready to tackle the day. This blog highlights some hints and tips for organising a teacher’s desk so that you can start your each school day as calm as possible!

 Organising a Teacher’s Desk (#teachergoals)

Whether you are the traditional teacher desk type of person or just have a working bench area to store all of your items, I feel it is important to have an organised space, a safe haven you can go to during breaks, before and after school! For me, an organised space led to organised thinking!

Weekly Organisation

These drawers are available at a variety of stores such as Kmart or Officeworks. We used a little bit of washi tape to jazz them up a bit and used our editable Tray Labels – Stripes to add the weekday labels on the drawers. I would use these drawers to organise all of my worksheet activities for each day for the week ahead!

This #organisationhack is a great way to also check you have done all of your photocopying for the week. Another bonus, relief teachers that come into your class will have the worksheets on your desk ready to go!

Assessment Organisation

Assessments/trackers/checklists/student goals… all of this can become a little overwhelming and you may find you have bits and pieces all over the place! I started two main folders on my desk to ensure nothing went missing! I had my assessment trackers in one folder. We have a huge range of Australian Curriculum Assessment Trackers that would work perfectly!

I also had a folder for student work samples that I was collecting throughout the term to refer to when report writing and carrying out parent/teacher interviews or to display in student portfolios. Having these folders with everything together made the reporting period so much less stressful! Also, we would have meetings with our Principal about students meeting expectations as well, so having these folders handy definitely saved a lot of time.

Spare Notes and Worksheets

I found that spare notes and worksheets that had been handed out were often just sitting in a pile on my desk… somewhere! If a student was absent one day and came up to me the next day asking for notes or missed work, I was scrambling through my piles of paperwork trying to find the spares!

Not anymore… with this simple idea!

Any spares for the week would be clipped here and it made life so much easier. Students were able to collect the worksheets and notes themselves by unclipping them from the hanger. Winning!

Clipboard Notice Boards

One of my colleagues did this on her desk and I really liked how accessible timetables, class lists or simple reminder notes were! I bought these clipboards from Kmart for $3 each, such a great addition to an organised desk that makes it easy to grab when you need them and also easy to write on!

Task Cards Organiser

The storage of classroom resources is one that is never-ending. But, once you find something that totally works – you roll with it! This folder was one of them for me. The perfect way to organise any task cards that you may have sorted into subject areas.

This definitely made my life a lot easier! I would have this easily accessible on my desk so that I could just grab the folder, find the subject I was working on and pick a task or activity that linked in well. This was also perfect for any relief teachers that came in!

Check out our huge collection of classroom task cards for some ideas and inspiration.

Bits and Bobs Organiser

It happens and it happens very quickly. You soon have drawers full of all those bits and bobs that you seem to collect as a teacher. Then, when you want a particular item…you can’t find it!! That is where this amazing storage idea comes in handy! I bought this set of small drawers from Bunnings.

I used Washi tape to make it pretty and then used our Desk Name Tags – Watercolour printed two to a page to get the right size for the drawer labels. You choose what would best go into the drawers for your classroom! I found having band-aids easily accessible, spare whistles, thumbtacks, rubber bands, push pins and paper clips were a definite must!

There you have it! Some hints and tips on how I organised my teacher desk and ultimately felt more at ease in the classroom. Obviously, we are all different in what works for us. But using these ideas definitely made me feel in more control during my first year of teaching.

Share your hints and tips for organisation in the comments below.