Megan Zara and The Open Practice Academy
Megan Zara is an educator, researcher, strategist, and facilitator. She's the founder of The Open Practice Academy, a practice built to help people and organizations turn important knowledge, good intentions, and scattered effort into systems they can actually use, and actually keep using.
That's the short answer.
Here's the longer one.
Who I am
I’ve spent most of my career in the space between what people believe and what they’re actually able to do about it.That started in classrooms. I taught English language arts and then technology applications in Frisco ISD, and somewhere along the way I kept finding myself pulled toward the work around the work: chairing school improvement committees, leading teams, helping people make sense of change. From there I moved into digital learning coaching, where I piloted Canvas as a learning management system and helped design the district’s rollout. I got to watch one decision move outward into hundreds of classrooms, and I started paying close attention to what happened between the idea itself and the way people were actually able to use it.
Later, as a Digital Learning Specialist in Fort Worth ISD, I did that work at a larger scale, supporting campuses across the district and co-leading a redesign of the Campus Tech Liaison program. My path has also moved through libraries, higher education, open education, instructional design, faculty development, and professional learning. Each space has taught me some version of the same thing: good ideas don’t usually fail because people don’t believe in them. They fail because nobody built the bridge between the belief and the Tuesday-morning version of the work.
I’m currently a PhD student in the Leadership and Change program at Antioch University. My research lives inside that same tension. I’m interested in how people and institutions translate values into lived practice, not as an abstract exercise, but through the small, repeated decisions that make up real work. It’s the same question that has followed me through classrooms, district initiatives, committee meetings, faculty conversations, and organizational change. I didn’t set out to build a theory around it. I just kept running into something my existing frameworks couldn’t quite explain, and for me, that’s usually where a real question begins.
What The Open Practice Academy (TOPA) is...
I founded The Open Practice Academy to help people and organizations turn what they believe into something they can actually sustain.
Most of the people who find TOPA aren’t short on knowledge, care, or good intentions. Usually, they have plenty of all three. What they’re missing is the connective tissue between knowing and doing: a documented process instead of something living in one person’s memory, a shared understanding instead of one person carrying the whole thing, a system built around how the work actually happens instead of how somebody imagined it should happen.
TOPA meets that gap through a few different doors, depending on what someone is actually carrying. Relational Practice Coaching supports individuals who are trying to close the distance between their values and their everyday practice. Practice Cartography helps organizations understand and document how their work really happens, especially when too much of that knowledge lives in one person’s head, and then builds a system around what is actually there. Custom Learning Pathways helps teams and institutions move from “we’re interested in this” to “we know how to do this here.” Belong & Return focuses on relational participation and return, not loyalty as a gimmick. Specialist Support and Website Clarity are there for people who need something narrower: a thinking partner, a clearer process, or a website that finally sounds like them and makes sense to the people they want to reach.
Different doors, same underlying commitments. Care as infrastructure. Enterability. Accessibility by design. Clarity over cleverness. Distributed ownership. Evidence-informed iteration. Those aren’t values I add at the end to make the work sound good. They’re part of how I decide what should be built in the first place, who needs to be able to enter it, what people are being asked to carry, and whether the thing can actually live beyond the moment we create it.
Why this is one page, not two
I don’t think you can separate me from TOPA cleanly, and I’m not sure you should try.
TOPA isn’t a brand I built and then stepped behind. It’s what happened when I finally had enough room to ask, out loud and on purpose, the question that had been following me through nearly every part of my work: what conditions make it possible for people to actually do the things they say they value?
Everything I build through TOPA is, in some way, an attempt to stay with that question. Not to solve it once and for all, because I don’t think that’s how this kind of work works, but to keep testing what becomes possible when we design for care, clarity, access, participation, and the realities of actual human beings doing actual work.
So when you ask who I am, the honest answer includes what I’ve built. And when you ask what The Open Practice Academy is, the honest answer includes the questions that made me build it.