In this Cc Guide for Admins, we’ll focus on how to create collaborative teams, so that teachers can co-plan and review exemplary plans from their colleagues, as well as how SPED, ESOL and GenED teachers can strengthen their planning routines.

Pre-work: As a bit of pre-work, you’ll want to be sure that you’ve set up a school account and added all teachers and administrators. If you haven’t done that, take a look at our Cc for Admins video on Account Set-Up.

In this guide, we’ll focus on:

So let’s get started. We’ll begin by creating and optimizing our teams. After logging into your school account, click the home icon in the top left corner of the screen. Find the name of your school account and click “Go to School.”

From here, we’ll click “+Add Team.” We can also access this through the “School Setup” page.

How you decide to divide your teachers is all about what works best for your use case. You might choose to divide teachers by their content: something like, ELA or Math. Or, you may choose to create teams based on grade-level. Because teachers can be a part of multiple teams, there is no limit to the number of ways you can group your teachers.

By default, teachers will automatically have access to every planbook within the teams to which they’ve been assigned.

Next up, we’ll talk about various use cases for shared planbooks. If you work with co-teachers, they can create a shared planbook and complete all of their lessons together.

To do this, either teacher can click “Create a Planbook,” set it up with their classes, schedule, and templates and then share the planbook with their co-teacher. They can do this by clicking “Sharing and Class Website,” selecting “Collaborate with an Individual,” entering their co-teachers school email address and choosing how they would like to share their planbook.

Similarly, this process is an excellent solution when ESOL/SPED Teachers co-plan or provide push-in/pull-out for a GenEd teacher. When a General Educator shares editing access, ESOL and SPED teachers can add in daily accommodations, student-specific modifications, as well as provide links or attachments to differentiated assignment or practice sets.

Shared planbooks also streamline planning routines for contained classrooms. Let’s imagine an elementary school, where 5 instructors have their own contained classrooms. Though each instructor is responsible for teaching all subjects, these teachers can use one shared planbook to divide the work.

After creating a single planbook with every different class—we’ll say, Math, Science, ELA, and Social Studies—a teacher can share the planbook with their colleagues and divide up lesson creation for each subject. The result is that teachers can lean into their content expertise and reduce their planning time. Which leads to higher-quality lessons and stronger facilitation in the day-to-day.

And there you have it: using Cc for collaborative teams is a great way to unite your teachers, cut down on planning time, and empower your instructors to learn from the strengths and the experience of more veteran colleagues.