How to Handle Multiple Spanish Classrooms

If you’re used to having your own classroom, getting the news that you’re going to have multiple Spanish classrooms can be super stressful. Most people don’t want to be a traveling teacher, or teach from a cart! I wanted to share with you my experience as a traveling teacher and tips for how to handle having multiple Spanish classrooms.

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My Background

Just so you can understand where I am coming from as I write this post, for the first 3 years of my career I had my own classroom. Then, during my 4th-7th years of teaching I had multiple classrooms, sharing with other teachers. Sometimes I was sharing with another Spanish teacher, sometimes a different language! I’ve been in as many as three classrooms and multiple Spanish classrooms in different schools. I have some different traveling teacher perspectives to share with you!

How to Handle Multiple Spanish Classrooms

I have four areas to share tips for you as you consider your year as a traveling teacher:

1. Communication
2. Supplies
3. Set Up (both the space and on the day to day)
4. Organization and keeping track of it all

Communication

Communication is KEY. You will be in another person’s space – and they’ll be in YOUR space. Did you ever have a roommate in college? Ever sign a roommate agreement? Those things are handy and it’s not the worst idea to consider something similar with your new teacher “roomie”.

An important mindset to be in is realizing that it’s not that you don’t have a classroom, you have multiple Spanish classrooms. Each of those spaces aren’t just the other teacher’s, they’re yours, too!

Talk with the people that you’re sharing with and figure out how to share the space. Which space on the wall can you use for your visual supports? Which counter space will be yours for collecting work? Who gets the desk – or are you sharing it? Come up with a plan!

Supplies

I hate carts. I don’t do the traveling teacher cart. In my experience, the cart doesn’t let me move and maneuver as quickly as I need to, and when I need to go up and down stairs going all the way to the elevator and back just was never efficient enough for me.

I prefer to use a backpack because the double straps are supportive for my back and shoulders, and the pockets provide organization for the other supplies. In the backpack I carry:

• laptop
• writing utensils – always include Expo markers because you never know when the ones in the room will be dead!
• copies for the day
• folder for completed work

Duplicate Items – I either store these in multiple schools, or if I’m in one school I store them in multiple classrooms

• a squishy ball I use for this game
• dice

I don’t carry and cart around art supplies. I prefer to speak with the teacher I’m sharing with and figure out where they store things in their room. Often a roomie’s art supplies are supplied by the school and that would make them fair game! If they were purchased by your new roommate, don’t steal from them (obviously!). This comes back to the communication piece.

Set Up

When you’re considering how to set up your Spanish classrooms, you need to discuss with your coworkers what space you have available. As I mentioned earlier, I prefer to chat about shared wall space so I can hang up what I consider the absolute must haves for visual aid.

If you’re in 9 different classrooms, or your roommate has covered every single inch of the wall, you can use your slides for your visuals, too! The example slide below is from a Thanksgiving themed movie talk which is a free resource you can download here.

How do you handle set up with activities that you hang on the wall? When you’re traveling, it can be a pain to feel like you have to run to your room to do running dictation or Corre en Círculos, so I wanted to share my simple fix for that. I take a stool or a desk in front of the door and put the copies right on it along with a bunch of tape. I stand there and as I welcome them in I thank them for their help! They get really used to the routine because we do this with gallery walks and so many other activities!

Another option is to put things in a shared space between. If you’re in the same school, but in multiple classrooms, you can put things out in the hallway, the team center, or out in the dead end area of the hallway that leads to the stairwell. That way you just hang it up once for your whole day!

Organizing Multiple Spanish Classrooms

I use daily folders for my copies – Monday through Friday! Then when I come to school, I pull out the file and pop it into my backpack. When I’m at multiple schools, I keep copies at my first stop of the day. I prefer to make and keep copies at that first school to help me keep things there.

Write everything down. Meetings, events, fire drills, etc. There are SO many different things going on in any day, and it gets multiplied when you’re at different schools. Don’t forget you can ask your roommates too!

How to Handle Multiple Spanish Classrooms

If you got the news that you’ll be a traveling teacher this year, I hope this blog post has been helpful for you! If you have any questions, or advice of your own to share, please drop a comment down below!

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