Motivate your photographers by supplying them with the necessary tools to assist them in creating memorable visual images.
Nothing is quite as frantic as a badly organized yearbook room at deadline. Usually, most advisers have more than enough staff and more than enough time to make deadlines manageable. However, advisers’ main problem seems to be not having time to sit down and develop a plan for optimum staff efficiency. Therefore, with apologies to David Letterman, I would like to share my top 10 ways to improve staff development.
When people work together as a team, it shows in the finished product. Without a yearbook “team,” it would be impossible to produce a book. However, it is up to you how tight your team is. The tighter the team, the better the book. Below are some suggestions for bringing your staff together, and creating a family atmosphere inside (and outside) the yearbook room.
They say that good work is its own reward, and when a yearbook staff begins pulling the first yearbooks from the box, you know this is true. However, by the time they begin unpacking books, they have been waiting for their reward for nearly a year. Because yearbook is such a long-term project, a series of small rewards along the way can keep a staff on track and motivated.
Using job descriptions to organize staff lets each student know what is expected, and lets you see if every job that needs to be done is covered. Yearbook production flows much more smoothly and deadlines are easier to meet when the staff knows what part they play in the process.
The best approach to managing your time is the approach that works best for you. There are many general suggestions that can be made to guide you in the right direction, but you may have to adapt these “formulas” to fit your specific life-style. Remember to keep your life under control!
Sometime before the first grading period is over (alas, sometimes by the end of the first week) the realization may come that you made a serious error in allowing someone on staff. Of course, in schools where counselors provide the line-up, you have no choice. However, many yearbook sponsors select their staffs, and still live to regret it.
Yearbooks are made up of 16-page signatures, always beginning with a right-hand page and ending with a left-hand page. In the printing process, a signature is a large sheet of paper on which eight pages (a flat) are printed on each side. After both sides have been printed, the sheet is folded and cut so the pages are in book form.
It’s a fact of life – students die. So do teachers. It is an emotional time for any school. But for publication staffs, emotions cannot rule your decisions. Your staff needs a clear policy so that all school deaths are handled equally, avoiding questions of favoritism.
Yearbook advisers must be inventive. The following six tips might help you be more organized, save some time and even help handle a few of life’s little inconveniences.
It usually does not take long for people in stressful jobs, such as parents, to start analyzing repetitive or tedious tasks to try to figure out a better way to do things.