Tips when you don't have your own room.....

I'm reducing to 0.4FT from September and will be losing my Lab. The worst day I teach in 4 different rooms (all quite far apart - 3 different buildings)
For me this is a personal nightmare, I hate the change of seating arrangement and the feeling of never quite being at home in each room you teach in. Also there is the problem of making sure you have everything you need for every lesson - books, pens, rulers, glue sticks, resources etc
Any tips on managing it before the stress gets me (and I haven't even started)??

 

1) Check whether you can improve the distribution of rooms you're in. Get hold of the list of free rooms for each period, and also keep an eye on when colleagues in your department have sixth form - it's usually relatively easy to move a sixth-form lesson elsewhere (although this may be less so if you're talking labs). It's not unreasonable to ask if somebody could move elsewhere with the odd lesson if that would then give you a more sensible set of rooms.
Think about what will be most helpful: sometimes it's most useful to be in the same room every time with a group, but obviously with consecutive lessons, spotting a room you can use for both lessons may be more useful. It might be that a combination is helpful.

Sometimes a look at the free rooms timetable will discover a little-used room in another department which you can use as a base (but do check whether it's little-used because it's unbearably hot or something like that).

The timetabler may have used any old algorithm for allocating rooms in the first place - probably "lab if there's one available" and possibly just the first free room they spotted after that.

2) Commandeer a bit of space in any rooms you are using more than once, particularly if you teach a group entirely in that room. Talk nicely to the "owner" of the room, and maybe they can give you a bit of cupboard space and a display board.

3) We used to have a couple of tool boxes for our trainee teachers, containing glue sticks, scissors, etc.

4) If you have any awkward changes where you have to rush across the school, see whether whoever is in the room before you would be able to help - if you can e-mail them a starter to put on the board, they might be willing to get the kids in and started. I used to have a room before someone coming from teaching cookery the other side of the school, and I'd often get the kids in and ready, rather than have them in the corridor disrupting everyone else's lessons.

5) If you teach 8ZW after break on the far side of the school, train a couple of helpful kids to report to the lab technician to collect anything needed on their way to the lesson.

 

This is something your head of faculty should be looking at as well as you.
You will need to be well organised. The problems come with things like piles of marked and unmarked books which are bulky and can easily be abandoned in the wrong place.
Tool box is good, crate on wheels might be good.