What teaching openly means
Teaching openly means making some of your teaching visible and reusable beyond your own classroom. For many teachers that begins modestly: posting a lesson plan online under a license that lets others adapt it, or sharing a unit outline with a network of colleagues. For a few it goes further, with public course sites, open discussion or classes that invite outside participation.
Done well, it can help other teachers and sharpen your own practice. Done carelessly, it can expose pupils, breach someone else’s rights or create pressure to perform. The habits below aim at the first outcome. They are general suggestions, not legal advice, and your school’s policies and local rules come first.
Start with permission and policy
Before publishing anything, find out what your employer expects. Some schools claim rights over materials produced as part of the job; others leave this to teachers; policies vary widely. If it is unclear, ask in writing and keep the answer. Check also whether a school policy governs online publishing, social media or pupil data.
Decide what you are comfortable making open. A plan for a lesson on fractions is quite different from a detailed record of how one named class behaved. Most teachers share designs and materials, not the day-to-day events of a classroom.
Choose a license on purpose
If you want others to reuse your work, say so clearly. A document with no license is, in many places, treated as fully reserved by default, which leaves colleagues unsure whether they may use it. Creative Commons licenses are a well-known general approach: they let a creator choose conditions such as requiring credit or restricting commercial use. The differences matter, so read the license summaries rather than guessing.
A few related habits:
- State the license on the document itself, not only on a separate page.
- Put your name, the date and a version number on each file.
- Check that every image, chart or passage inside your resource is yours or openly licensed. Keep a short list of sources.
- Remember that you cannot release material you do not have the right to release.
Design lessons so they can travel
A plan that makes sense only to its author is hard to reuse. When you intend to publish, write for a stranger:
- State the learning goal in a sentence.
- List what pupils are assumed to know already.
- Give the sequence of activities with approximate timings.
- Explain the reasoning behind choices that are not obvious.
- Include likely misconceptions and how you responded.
- Offer variations for different levels or lengths of lesson.
This discipline improves your own planning too. Many teachers find that writing for others forces clearer thinking than a private scribble would. It also supports accessible content authoring, because a stranger may need captions, readable fonts and plain structure that you would not bother with for yourself.
Protect pupils first
Pupils did not choose to take part in your openness. Treat their privacy as a firm boundary.
- Do not publish names, faces, voices or identifiable work unless the school has a clear policy and consent that covers the specific use.
- Remove details that could identify pupils indirectly, such as unusual events, small-class descriptions or location.
- Be careful with screenshots of online platforms, which can reveal names or messages.
- Think about children’s safety online as a general principle, and follow your school’s safeguarding guidance.
When in doubt, share the lesson design and leave out the people.
Expect an audience, and decide how to respond
Public work attracts attention, sometimes useful and sometimes not. Plan for both.
Feedback can reveal unclear instructions, missing steps and alternative approaches that you had not considered. Decide how you will gather it: a comment space, a short form or a named contact. Reply politely, thank people who help and update the document when a point is sound. Note changes in a version history so users know what altered.
Unkind or misguided comments also happen. You do not need to engage with all of them. Set simple ground rules for any space you control, and keep the option to switch comments off or remove a resource. Teachers sometimes worry about being judged on a single lesson plan, so label drafts as drafts and show your reasoning, which invites constructive criticism rather than quick verdicts.
Keep teaching, not performing
Teaching in view can tempt people to polish their performance. The risk is that lessons become designed for the audience rather than for the pupils. A useful test is to ask whether a choice helps the class in front of you. If it does not, drop it, even if it would look good online.
It is also fine to publish ordinary, unglamorous materials. A clear worksheet with answers and a short teacher note can be more valuable to a colleague than an elaborate project. Evidence that sharing improves pupils’ learning directly is limited, so there is no need to treat openness as a performance target.
Look after your time and energy
Openness adds tasks: formatting, licensing, checking sources, replying to messages. Without limits, it adds to educator workload and can feed fatigue. Some boundaries help:
- Publish a small number of items you are proud of rather than everything.
- Set a regular, brief slot for maintenance, such as one afternoon each term.
- Reuse the same template so that formatting does not eat hours.
- Say clearly if a resource is not maintained, so users know what to expect.
Review and retire
Materials age. Links break, curricula change and better methods appear. Review your published items once or twice a year. Update what is still useful, add a note to anything outdated, and remove resources that could mislead. Retiring a resource gracefully is part of responsible sharing.
Teaching in the open is optional, and no teacher should feel obliged to do it. For those who choose to, steady habits around licensing, privacy and time make it far more likely to be a positive experience.