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Organizational Strategies

By: Carmen Willings
teachingvisuallyimpaired.com
June 12, 2022

As part of the ECC, we teach individuals who are blind or have low vision the importance of being organized. This isn’t just a skill to teach your students, but a skill to hone for yourself. By maintaining organization, you will be able to know exactly where materials and files are and not waste time trying to find them. Additionally, by storing materials properly, they won’t get broken. By keeping your work areas organized, you will set an example to your students the importance of organization.

Get Organized

The beginning of the school year is a perfect time to get organized, but if you don’t maintain that organization throughout the year, you will need to periodically get organized once again. Everyone will have their own system that works best for them so find what works for you.
If you are a returning teacher, hopefully you did a lot of work at the end of the last school year to help yourself out. Even when you do, you never know when a student may move over the summer and new students are added to your caseload. For this reason, I use a checklist and systematically make sure I’ve completed all tasks. You will want to make sure your VI handbook is up to date. If you haven’t created one, I strongly recommend you do so as it will make your life much easier! Make sure you have current data collection forms that align with goals and objectives that are current for each of your students.

Once you have the critical beginning of the school year tasks complete, you can make sure your file drawers, flash drives, Google drive, and any other online platforms your program uses are organized. If you haven’t done so, also organize your instructional materials, assessment materials and AT inventory. I like to get these organized at key times during the year – beginning, mid-year and end of year as things can get in disarray when you’re racing between students, meetings and projects.

Schedules & Appointments

It is important to be flexible and adjust your schedule for meetings and appointments outside of your typical schedule. In addition to my printed weekly schedule, I maintain an old-fashioned planner. I pencil in my regular appointments and add my meetings. To draw my attention to the meetings and appointments that are outside of my routine, I usually place a cloud around them to make them stand out. I also use calendar reminders and invitations for meetings on my phone. I use the planner to document my travel between schools as well. I place a number of miles between schools and the total miles for the day. This makes my monthly travel form easier to complete. If a student cancels and it was a “no show”, I cross out the student’s name and write NS. This is my way of indicating I drove to the school but didn’t work with the student as I still claim the mileage. At the beginning of the year, I go through my students and write on the side of each month when IEP’s and reevaluations are due so I can anticipate them.

Planned Weekly Schedule

During preplanning when I’m gathering student schedules and bell schedules I collaborate with each case manager and teacher to determine possible times to work with each student. I generally try to schedule my students that are following the standard course of study first as their schedules tend to have the least amount of flexibility. Once I have those times set. I schedule my students that are following a modified course of study. In my district we are strongly encouraged to see the most students on what is identified as Federal count days as it is tied to funding, so I plan to have the most contact times on those days.

I try to prevent the dreaded “no shows” by coordinating with teachers and parents and asking them to let me know if a student is absent. If a student is frequently absent and the teacher has a track record of not letting me know about the absence, I will text ahead of time to make sure the student is present. I also check schedules with teachers at the beginning of the month to find out if there are any known assemblies or field trips that would prevent me from seeing the student. I encourage students who are following the standard course of study to message me through the communication portal used by the school to let me know of an absence or if they will be taking a test or on a field trip.

Know that there will be no shows. Try to have a backup plan and have work that you can complete and a location you can work in so the time isn’t completely wasted. As far as scheduling my lunch, it’s important to know the program policies on how long a lunch break is. Some programs I’ve worked for have allowed me to work through lunch and leave early which was nice especially when my kids were young as it gave me flexibility for picking them up from school.