August 26, 2025
2
Min Read Time
Teaching yearbook: 11 resources to bookmark
We created a master list for practical, tested strategies that work in a real yearbook classroom. If you didn’t volunteer to take on yearbook class (we are few, but mighty), you either showed up last to the meeting, or you’re the new teacher. Then what? Traditional teacher prep programs trained us for classroom management and subject-specific pedagogy. Teaching yearbook is a hybrid of design, photography, marketing, and event planning. It’s a prep that requires skills from multiple careers, and most of us learn them as we go, under deadline pressure, and with a room full of students watching. Major aura points loading.
Professional development resources
A stronger you means a stronger program. Here are some resources to help you take a recess from yearbook stress.
Webinars
Tuesday “Lunch and Learn” sessions are twenty minutes of focus to equip you and your team throughout the year. Just pick your time zone, log in, and leave with something you can use today.
Thursday sessions are one-hour overviews to help you plan, design, and publish with purpose. These synchronous training series start with the same line, “Hi, we’re Cassie and Erika, and we are here to join your yearbook team.”
They mean it.
Dealing with complaints
Two customer care experts, Treering’s Abby Oxendine and Chris Frost, a former Disney guest services agent, shared their proactive approach to working with teachers, parents, and students with yearbook complaints.
- Listen to the complaint
- Ask for specific details
- Offer a solution
- Follow up, follow up, follow up
Adviser burnout
We’d rather you have this one and not need it.
Some preventative burnout measures include workflow adjustments, such as
- Reusing layouts from previous years as templates
- Creating repeatable workflows, such as setting up photo and text styles
- Taking advantage of built-in design automations, such as portrait autoflow
If you’re already there and need a yearbook mindshift, build gratitude and celebration into your program… then call your publisher!
Planning resources for yearbook
Start the year with a clear plan so you run the yearbook, not the other way around.
Job descriptions
Clear expectations help guide student and volunteer yearbook teams. When the proverbial ball gets dropped, it’s easy to point the finger; being proactive with your yearbook team early in the school year will improve your workflow. It will develop ownership. It will reveal leaders.
Staff manual template
Another way to develop proactive communication is through a staff manual. A yearbook staff manual outlines policies and procedures for class time and crisis time. It includes how you will handle:
- Confidentiality
- Photos
- Superlatives and senior quotes
- Journalistic integrity
- Grading
- Style guide
- Content approval
- Equipment
- Complaints and refunds
Agenda slides for yearbook class
Agenda slides provide accountability for your yearbook team. They can be project-based or have a time-management focus. Either way, you should include these five things on your agenda slide:
- Date and class information
- Learning objectives or goals for the day's lesson
- Class agenda
- Deliverables
- Announcements and reminders
Grading checklists
Use checklists to help students prep for submission and grading.
Younger students and emerging designers use checklists to have a structured framework, to help them remember the essential elements of a spread. Returning yearbook students use checklists as a tool for quality control and peer review.
The checklist becomes an educational resource in itself. As students engage with it, they absorb design principles and develop a keen eye for what works in terms of design and theme development.
Instructional resources to build out your curriculum
Give students the tools, skills, and confidence to create their best work without you having to reinvent the wheel.
Free yearbook curriculum
When you have classroom teachers create the curriculum and classroom teachers vet the curriculum, it’s A+ material. The eight modules each include five days of instruction:
- Daily learning target
- Bell ringer
- Interactive lesson with guided student practice
- Exit ticket
Clubs with limited instructional time can scale using the first day’s lesson from each module. These standalone lessons are designed to give yearbook club sponsors the foundation for teambuilding, theme, design, writing, photography, marketing, and proofing.
5 Photo mini lessons
Mini means focused. (No pun intended.) Each of the five lessons works on one area of photojournalism to help students capture action and reaction. These lessons include ideas to strengthen students’ understanding of
- Rule of thirds
- Photo angles
- Cell phone photography
- Depth of field
The final lesson is a cumulative assessment in the form of photography bingo.
Bell ringers
Start each meeting or class period with the yearbook top of mind by using one of the 60 curated bell ringers. Focusing on design, photography, theme, and yearbook critiques, these five-minute warm-ups provide a launch point for instruction, work sessions, or discussion.
Proofing tools
Last on the list, but not last priority, proofing your yearbook should be accomplished weekly and monthly plus a cumulative review. Treering's proofing tools include 99 PDF proofs plus a complete copy of your printed book (workd in progress welcome).
When including proofing in your teaching routine, yearbook advisers may want to involve campus personnel outside of the yearbook team: the school secretary, PTO/PTA leaders, and maybe an English teacher.
While teaching yearbook may not have come with a roadmap, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Using professional development resources, planning tools, and instructional, you can create a structure that makes the work manageable and meaningful for you and your students. Choose one of the above to put into practice this week, and use it as the starting point for building a program that grows stronger each school year.
