May 6, 2025
2
Min Read Time
The 5 game-changing blog posts you’ve (somehow) been missing
You might be missing these favorite yearbook ideas. If any part of your yearbook process feels stuck, scattered, or stale, one of these posts is probably the solution you didn’t know you needed. Read them. Share them. Build them into your curriculum or club routine and watch your yearbook program transform.
1. Easy +1: a guide to leveling up your yearbook
This comprehensive guide outlines five key ways to elevate your yearbook beyond collage pages. It provides practical steps to add something new to next year’s book: a focus on storytelling, expanded coverage, better photography, or modular design.
Use the five focus areas to create
- Rotating workshop stations early in the year to build foundational skills.
- A self-assessment rubric for your team.
- A “Level Up” day where each leader identifies one area to improve in their section.
2. How to choose a yearbook theme
This piece walks you through the theme process without relying on chaotic verbal brainstorms. (Some yearbook creators even find its anti-brainstorming angle a little divisive. And we liked it.) It provides teaching support to non-designers and new advisers with practical, flexible guidance.
It includes prompts, real-world examples, and tips for involving students at all grade levels.
3. 10 people to thank
Yearbook creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This gratitude-focused post highlights the unsung yearbook heroes, including the front office staff, IT teams, principals, coaches, and more. Yearbooks are a high-stress, deadline-driven project; injecting gratitude is a reminder that the yearbook extends beyond your class or club.
Make gratitude part of your yearbook culture:
- Include a recurring “Who Helped You This Week?” check-in during staff meetings.
- In the yearbook, you can include a “Behind the Book” thank-you spread.
4. Adviser advice: keep, change, stop
One of the few tools that seamlessly transferred from student teaching to the newsroom is “Keep, Change, Stop,” a structured reflection tool. It helps teams evaluate the yearbook process with three simple prompts: what to keep, what to change, and what to stop doing. (Clever name, eh?)
It’s an adaptable debrief for editors, staff, and advisers alike.
In this blog post, four yearbook advisers share their POV. Based on their real-life examples, we have a framework to drop what’s not working and preserve beneficial habits each school year.
Doing this exercise with middle and high school yearbook creators encourages student voice and leadership in shaping the next year’s book. “Keep, Change, Stop” promotes a healthy, intentional yearbook culture.
5. Yearbook debriefing: a summer reflection
This five-minute read outlines a strategic, low-stress way to reflect on the yearbook process over the summer. It offers questions and prompts to help advisers and returning staff capture what worked and what needs to shift before the next yearbook creation cycle begins.
This post helps you process what happened while it’s still fresh, and with a little distance.
To use it now, assign editors a summer reflection form based on the post’s questions and use their input to build your back-to-school agenda.
We all want our yearbooks to stand out, and sometimes the best yearbook ideas (wink, wink) are hiding in plain sight. We hope these five blog posts deliver the clarity, creativity, and strategy you and your staff need.
