Spotlight Teachers: Integrating Faculty into Your Yearbook

Good educators are the foundation of every school – from the adviser of your yearbook class to the gym teacher who helps students stay healthy. It’s typical for yearbooks to include a section focused on educators, but it often only includes the most basic information: the teacher’s name, what they teach and perhaps one or two facts about them.
But the fact is that teachers contribute to the personality of a school just as much as students. A good educator can be the difference between a pass and a fail, between a student wanting to come to class and wanting to skip out. The best teachers have the power to change the way students see the world, and for that, they deserve more than just their name and subject in your yearbook.

Consider adding a teacher spotlight to your yearbook each year, and ask students to vote for the top three “teachers of the year”.  Or, have each class (freshman, sophomore, junior and senior) vote for their favorite. Then, develop a profile of each of the winners. The chance to sit down one-on-one and interview the faculty you spend time with every day with can be a unique opportunity. Craft a list of fun and interesting questions that will help students get to know them better, and reflect the sort of person they are both in and out of the classroom. Your teachers no doubt have stories to tell, and the yearbook can be a useful platform for that type of content.
You can also pepper fun teacher facts throughout the rest of the yearbook, such as favorite movies, quotes and funniest stories. Mini-profiles are another possibility that could accompany each faculty photo. A few interesting stock questions to which they can provide one-word answers that can go a long way in making the staff section of your yearbook more interesting and engaging.
While teachers are not part of the student body, they are part of the lives of every student in the school. They play a prevalent role in daily life and learning, from drama to science and beyond. It’s important to create a yearbook that students can look back on years later to remember not only the friends they had, but the faculty who helped shape the various paths they took.