The Australian Curriculum: Mathematics (AC:M) prompts consideration of planning processes teachers typically use (as a whole school, in grade levels, and at the classroom level). In order to gain insights into the nature of the planning decisions teachers make, Australian teachers drawn from every state and territory were invited to respond to a survey on planning processes, during professional learning programs or voluntarily online through the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers' website. In this article, we provide background to the overall project in which this survey was situated, and describe the process through which the survey was developed. Subsequent articles in this journal detail some important findings from the survey data. (Contains 1 table and 1 footnote.)