Spring Cleaning: Tips for Getting Your Classroom Organized

On the whole, music rooms tend to be busy and messy. Large groups of students rotate in and out during the day, teachers share the space for classes, rehearsals, or lessons, and there’s just so much stuff to deal with: student papers, sheet music, textbooks, pencils, art supplies, chairs, music stands, ukuleles, Orff instruments, African drums, 36 pairs of egg shakers, etc. etc. etc. Rather than “making it work” in the cluttered space you inherited from your predecessors, I encourage you to be proactive about tidying up your school’s music room. I firmly believe that you will be a happier teacher in a clean, organized space.

An Organized Classroom = A Happy Teacher

• You’ll be able to find things! No more students insisting that they turned in a missing assignment, no more last minute searches for colored pencils for the substitute’s activity tomorrow morning, and no more pausing in the middle of rehearsal to find a sharpened pencil.
• Your students will be neater! Your students will be more likely to treat your room and your materials with respect when you have modeled that behavior for them.
• Your principal and superintendent will thank you! The music room is a very visible area of the school, just like the main office, the gymnasium, the major hallways, etc. Those areas are (usually) kept in a clean, orderly state. Thoughtfully holding your own room to the same high standards will make your administrators happy (especially if this is a noticeable change from the practices of previous music teachers).
• You’ll feel more at ease! Consider your classroom to be your sanctuary. You may have a separate office, use the auditorium on a regular basis, or visit the teacher’s lounge several times a day, but your classroom is where you do the real work of music education. It’s probably where you spend most of your waking hours. This space should be filled with items that you want, kept in the way that you want them.

Tips for Getting and Staying Organized

If you’re ready to get to work, start with these specific action steps:

• Set aside time for cleaning and organizing. It may be the week before school starts in August, one afternoon a week, or a prep period during your day. Whenever it is, don’t let other activities take over—be purposeful about keeping that time set aside for cleaning and organizing your classroom.
• When in doubt, throw it out. You are under no obligation to keep every ripped choral octavo or broken autoharp. If you have items that are outdated and/or damaged cluttering the corners of your rooms, talk to your principal about throwing out or recycling them. If you really can’t bear to part ways with something that you aren’t currently using, at least get it out of the classroom and into a nice cupboard or storage closet.
• Involve your students. Make cleaning up the music room a regular part of your class routine. You must teach this routine, reinforce it, and then purposefully leave time for it at the end of class. Depending on the class, your routine might include carefully putting away instruments, straightening chairs, checking the floor for lost pencils, etc. If you’re a middle or high school teacher, also consider asking for student volunteers to serve as music librarians for your ensembles.
• Give everything a home. In order for the previous suggestion to work, you must create a specific home for everything in your room. I mean everything. You need a bin for students to hand in papers, a metal organizer for extra credit assignments, a jar for extra pencils, a container for mallets, a designated shelf for soprano xylophones, a basket on the piano for tuners and pitch pipes, etc. Once you’ve done this, your room will start to exist in a perpetual state of cleanliness. A student finds a pencil on the floor? They put in the jar for extra pencils. You use a pitch pipe in a cappella rehearsal? You return it to the basket on the piano. It’s magic!

Have specific suggestions for tidying up and organizing the music room? Feel free to add them below!