About - Teaching with Jodi Durgin and Company

Hi! I’m Jodi and I am the author of Teaching with Jodi Durgin and Company, Clutter-Free Classroom, and Teaching with Books, as well as the creator of everything in the Clutter-Free Classroom Teacher Store and Clutter-Free Classroom Teachers Pay Teachers Store.

I am a National Board Certified Teacher with 17 years of classroom experience teaching pre-K, kindergarten, first, second and third grade. I’ve loved each for different reasons.

On a personal note, I am a mom of three (a son and identical twin girls). My husband and I collaboratively homeschool them all (now that is a sentence I never in a million years thought I would write and a blog post of its own waiting to happen) and are absolutely loving the experience. We are from the Boston area and are currently taking advantage of the flexibility of a homeschool schedule to enjoy living on the gulf coast of Florida when there is snow or frost on the ground and the air would make my face hurt up north. In the summer and early fall, we can be found in New England.

I am passionate about helping teachers like you be the best educator you can be in a classroom with less mess and less stress. It is my mission to provide you with time-saving tips, tools, and strategies that will allow you to close the classroom door, leave the job behind, and enjoy your personal life on nights, weekends, and school vacations without guilt or sacrificing the quality of your work.

How It All Started

Did you ever take one of those career aptitude tests? In high school, our school guidance counselor administered them to each of us, and according to my answers, I would have been perfect in the role of “beautician” or “forest ranger.”

Seriously?!?!

That was comical for three reasons.

I rocked a ponytail in a scrunchie throughout high school, and aside from a very unfortunate incident involving a bottle of Sun-In, hair products were not my thing.
Nature is most definitely not my thing. In fact, I would describe myself as “an indoor type.” Sure I love the beach, but I try my best to avoid all other unpaved outdoor surfaces.
I am one of those people who has always known I wanted to be a teacher. I can’t remember ever wanting to do anything else (certainly nothing in the cosmetology or forestry fields).

And so I promptly checked the education box under the “intended major” section of my college application and never looked back.

After graduating from college, I quickly learned that in the northeast it was very challenging to gain experience as a teacher without an actual teaching job and even harder to get a job as a teacher without teaching experience. Florida, on the other hand, had many positions to fill (and lots of sun and fun) so off I went with my hopes and dreams (and only as much stuff as I could fit into my wee little Mazda Miata).

Fast forward two years… I moved back to the Boston area with a large moving van jam-packed with the contents of my classroom (towing a much more sensible vehicle that also had junk in the trunk in the form of picture books, bulletin board trims, and collection of mugs with cutesy teacher saying on them).

Over the three years that followed, I was moved from one classroom to another. Both times I moved, I took the place of retiring teacher who “gifted me” everything they had accumulated in a combined 82 years of teaching. Both of them literally walked out the door and left EVERYTHING behind.

I then changed grade levels annually for the five years (2nd, 1st, Kindergarten, 2nd, and finally 3rd). I was constantly adding new resources to my collection along the way… while also holding on to the old ones in case I returned to a previously taught grade level.

As a result, I had TOO MUCH STUFF! I was spending most of the waking hours of my life in a Clutter-FILLED Classroom. It was playing a toll on my health, happiness, and well-being.

I constantly felt stressed and overwhelmed. It impacted my teaching negatively, made me look like a hoarder and caused me to waste so much time reshuffling things and searching for items lost in the clutter.

It was time to get serious about organizing my classroom space and purging, donating or recycling the resources that were not serving a valuable purpose to my students or me.

I read books and articles about home organization. I tweaked and applied those tips and strategies to make them applicable to the classroom. Next, I focused on finding the best ways to organize and manage my teaching environment. Finally, I turned my attention to creating ways to decorate our learning space so it would be inviting and comfortable, yet visually clutter-free. It was important to me that my students could focus, learn, and reach their potential.

When my son was born, I had the privilege of taking an entire year off to be home with him.

And while he napped I started a blog back before teaching blogs were a thing. I am a trend-setting pioneer in that way.

I had already been presenting at workshops and consulting with teachers on ways to set up, decorate, and organize their classroom by that time, and the blog became an extension of those roles. By request, I began making my classroom resources available to teachers online and was the first to create classroom theme decor packages for teachers.

As part of my workshop presentations, I wrote The Clutter-Free Classroom Guide to Organizing Your Classroom. I did this so that the attendees would have a resource to take with them. When I opened my online teacher store, I listed it as one of my first products and things somehow took off from there.

I have since created a HUGE Classroom Management Bundle and an EXTREMELY THOROUGH Guided Math Workshop Bundle as well as 1,000+ other quality teaching resources.

Clutter-Free Classroom became an official family business (complete with an LLC after the title…fancy huh?) and we’ve been having fun learning the ropes of what all that means along the way.

Where We Are Now

Clutter-Free Classroom grew from me writing blog posts while my son napped to what it is today: A team of enthusiastic and experienced teachers on a mission to make your job as an elementary classroom teacher easier and more enjoyable under the umbrella, Teaching with Jodi and Company.

We support teachers through:

We support them in the following areas:

It’s been a wonderful journey and I feel so blessed to have the honor of doing what I now do. I am so grateful to my readers. It is a true honor to have the privilege of playing a role in classrooms around the world.

Connect With Us

Learn about the ways you can connect with us to get helpful teaching tips, ideas, and activities.

1. Join Our Email Club

Each week we send a free teaching resource for elementary teachers directly to your inbox. Sign up for the Email Club to get them!

2. Join Our Facebook Groups

Join one of our three Facebook groups below!

Clutter-Free Classroom

The Clutter-Free Classroom Facebook Group: Solutions for BUSY Teachers is a place for you to ask questions and get answers that will help to make the important work you do each and every day easier. Of course, you are welcome to just read along too.

The group was formed with the goal of being a positive place where I could connect with teachers and help to offer solutions to common problems such as:

getting rid of all those PILES of paper
creating easy systems for staying organized throughout the year
finding ways to create a classroom that runs itself
saving you time so you can reclaim your nights and weekends

It is a very supportive and friendly community. We would love to have you join us!

Teaching with Books

Teaching with Books Facebook Group is a place for elementary teachers and homeschool families who love reading aloud picture books with children. You’ll love the book recommendations, lessons, discussions, and project ideas we share.

We’re passionate about the integrated learning opportunities literature-based learning provides. We’re are excited to have you join us in helping children learn, grow and expand their thinking through the use of books as windows and mirrors to themselves and the world.

Elementary Math Teaching Ideas

Elementary Math Teaching Ideas is for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers that teach math. It’s perfect for teachers looking for ideas, inspiration, teaching tips, free resources, and support teaching math. We hope to see you on the inside!

3. Follow Us on Instagram

Clutter-Free Classroom

If you aren’t already, we encourage you to follow @clutterfreeclassroom. We share lots of classroom organization and management ideas over there that we think you’ll find helpful.

Teaching with Books

Our other Instagram account is @teaching_with_books. On that account, we share tons of picture book recommendations that we think you’ll love.