Are you a teacher responsible for making the yearbook for your school?
Are you a parent looking to increase elective opportunities for your child in middle school?
Are you a principal trying to round out your master schedule and even out core classes?
This is the totally human-generated user-guide for you!
After teaching math across grades 6 to 12 for 16 years, I moved last year to a gifted middle school position that ALSO came with being the yearbook adviser and a news/media literacy teacher. I'd always been interested in journalism, and even wondered during college if I should have tried to go to the highly rated School of Journalism at Mizzou, but never imagined I'd have an opportunity to teach it!
So there I was, a newly minted yearbook adviser with impossible personal expectations and years of math-teacher related trauma stemming from stress and microscopic attention placed on assessment data, curriculum alignment, and growth metrics. I looked over my shoulder almost all year. I second-guessed every choice. I had a vision for what I wanted class and our book to look and feel that was fighting against "that's not how Ms. _______ did it," all year.
I was probably only sure of TWO things:
- No matter how many hours it took me staying late and working by myself, I WOULD be submitting the yearbook by our publisher's deadline.
- No matter what else happened, this was going to be the best yearbook I had ever made.
That second affirmation was no doubt the most important and the grace I needed to give myself in order to BREATHE. Moving from teacher Algebra to publishing a yearbook? The ONLY goal was getting it done. Anything after that was a learning opportunity. And here's what I've learned between last year's challenges and this year's adjustments (and new setbacks).
From my experience, here are ____ things NOT to do when launching your middle school yearbook class.
1. Do NOT call the class "Yearbook".
We're in the closing stages of year two, and I'm pretty convinced there is NOT enough work in a middle school yearbook to spend two semesters teaching the skills, building your team's collaboration, and designing/editing the book. Surely, most of what you do will be with the end-goal of building your yearbook, but if you call the class something more like, "Middle School Journalism," or "Media and Print Publications," or "Middle School Publications," two things will align for you:
- You can task your students with producing OTHER things for school to document the year. A newspaper, podcasts, videos, websites, new student handbooks. You open yourself to empowering students to draft and publish any piece of media your school puts out to the community. Your students will know their work matters. Your students will have endless opportunities to see and show off their work. Your principal will appreciate you because your new class is their new community-engagement strategy.
- Expanding your class beyond "yearbook" will enable you to utilize journalism standards like these from the Journalism Educators Association. If you're not coming from a math or ELA classroom, this might not matter to you as much, but when your administration and school board are approving a new course, these standards are a most. When you are completing data reports for your yearly eval, these standards will be your copy+paste king. Your ducks will be in all the rows.
2. Do NOT lock yourself into a contract with a yearbook company that has a certain number of books you will purchase
In year one, I used the publisher that the teacher before me had used (and advised me to keep). I bought the same amount of books she had been buying and advertised it the same way I thought she'd been advertising, and I wound up with ONE HUNDRED books unsold. Not a good look. We shifted to a publisher whose platform enables families to buy books directly from them, so I (and our office professional) don't have to handle any purchase orders or cash/checks, families can pay digitally, and there will be NO books that go unsold.
3. Do NOT teach your class without a curriculum resource. You'll go crazy.
Googling resources, Teachers Pay Teachers, and generative AI can only get you so far. Year one I was throwing together lessons from a several sources as they came to me. This year I've followed the modules and blog posts that come from my publishing partner and class feels much more structured! (This is another reason to use those JEA standards!)
4. Do NOT limit your enrollment to 8th grade.
In my district, 6th grade is still elementary school, so there is some risk inherent to accepting "unproven" 7th graders to the staff. However, inclusivitity is a must, so you're going to want photos, quotes, stories, and surveys involving kids from all of the grades in your school. I've coached, begged, pleaded, and sent them intentionally during my class time, and still most of the photos of 7th graders that will be in our book this year will come from me. I have a hunch this is just a puzzle I haven't solved yet, but it is a challenge in our process. The photo-tagging process is also going to go much smoother if you have 7th graders in the room for someone to say, "WHO'S THIS KID??" without you having to answer that every time.
5. Assign clear roles for students to own, but do NOT get in a rush to figure these out.
My advice is to wait on assigning official roles until 2nd quarter at least. Give yourself time to put your students in diverse scenarios and groupings to see how they respond academically, socially, and emotionally. Giving students more time to try on roles while you're teaching photography, theme development, interview, writing, and editing will encourage them to keep an open-mind when it is time to fill out role applications. I did this in September last year and I wound up with some nice kids as editors who were not interested in leading their peers. I waited longer this year, but it still didn't matter because my structure was based on splitting the work between my two sections, and my students shuffled classes between semesters and the roles I thought were settled last semester became...muddy.
6. Do NOT expect you or your students to instantly become professional photo-journalists or copy-editors.
No matter how passionate or mature your students are, they're still middle schoolers. Give them feedback, cast your vision, set your deadlines, and pull them along as far as they'll go, but its important this is their book. Let them be proud of what they produce without your expectations sucking the joy.
Good luck on your journey! The role of yearbook adviser as chief storyteller for your school is fulfilling! You'll find new ways to celebrate staff and students, you'll learn so many name-face pairings, and your work will last - state test scores are fleeting, but that capturing that cringy style from 7th grade lives on in infamy!