Empower your team with a common, online space for collaborative planning...

Education study groups

Education research groups increasingly recommend teacher-driven professional development in the form of faculty study-groups as a means to reflective, effective, and enduring classroom reform.  Whether you are a teacher undertaking action research, sharing your thoughts on a shared reading, or an administrator organizing and keeping tabs on the efforts of your faculty, Open Planner's collaborative group structure is the perfect way to cohere a group of busy educators around a common intellectual purpose.  Browse our existing education study groups.

Grade level teams

Schools typically have limited common planning time in which teachers across a grade level can easily align their thinking and classroom practices.   With it's email subscriptions, forums, saved revisions, and shared planning documents, Open Planner can be a way for grade-level teams to get on the same page and build documents that evolve with the needs of the school and can be inherited by others as personnel changes.  Browse our current grade-level teams.

Interdisciplinary teams

The power of interdisciplinary studies is given much lip service but such cross-subject integration can be difficult to plan in practice because of the constraints of scheduling and common planning time.   An Open Planner team space is the perfect antidote to lack of common planning time, and the isolation of subject areas, as participating teachers can easily browse and comment each other's lesson plans and unit overviews to find and build interconnections.  See some of our interdisciplinary teams in action.

School design / redesign teams

As new schools are formed and older schools are re-formed, creating a trail of public, shared documents creates institutional memory that can serve to benefit both the growing school itself, as well as others on a similar path.  Planning a school often entails pulling together many disparate constituencies whose schedules are busy and often incompatible.  What better way to crystallize a vision for the public than in a space devoted to networked knowledge around best-practices?  See some of the great school-design efforts that Open Planner has already helped facilitate. 

School network teams

School districts are experimenting with various reorganization schemes, many of which place schools in support networks.  Education management organizations, both public and private sector, can take advantage of this free resource to enable professionals to identify and connect around common needs despite working in separate school sites.  Open Planner is also the perfect place to host network-organized curriculum development and coaching relationships.  Keeping the products of such important efforts in the public domain enables more schools to benefit from the public's investment in these support organizations.  See examples of support networks already using Open Planner.

Site-based teams

Any school-based team of educators can make good use of Open Planner's collaborative work space.  Whether managing a department's curriculum-mapping efforts, launching a new literacy initiative, or supporting a school's advisory program, Open Planner is a useful tool for solidifying, networking, and preserving your work.  See our site-based teams.

Subject area teams 

It goes without saying that a subject-area department seeking to align scope, sequence, and thematic elements of a school's academic program needs to have a shared planning framework.  Furthermore, Open Planner promises to provide educators the chance to reach out to an international community of teachers with the opportunity to co-develop and refine curricular resources that "work" within a given discipline.  This is perhaps where Open Educator shows it's greatest potential.  Check out what's already happening in our subject area teams.