L. S. Shulman, “Theory, practice, and the education of professionals,” The Elementary School Journal (1998): 511—526.

P. 525

“Cases are ways of parsing experience so practitioners can examine and learn from it. Case methods thus become strategies for helping professionals to “chunk” their experience into units that can become the focus for reflective practice. Cases therefore can become the basis for individual professional learning as well as a forum within which communities of professionals, both local and extended, as members of visible and invisible colleges, can store, exchange, and organize their experiences. They may well become, for teacher education, the lingua franca of teacher learning communities.”

I agree stronger interface design will help.

Aside: I have noted recently that the highly elaborate lesson plans were are (sometimes) mandated to write can lead to lower quality plans, insofar as we are not using maximally efficient use of time.

I like wiki templates, because you can re-program or add them as openly as regular wiki pages. But I don’t particularly like the programming syntax, and most wiki users would never tough template creation, which is probably a good thing for community stability.

In the state of New South Wales, in Australia, 200,000 netbooks are being rolled out to Year 9 students at the moment (plus 25000 for teachers).
(See the over the top promotional video)

But, in my opinion, the focus on teaching with these devices has been less than expected. Created resources have been distributed across multiple web-sites and no facility for sharing between teachers has been developed.

Your idea is just what we need.

Maria Droujkova: The essential SOCIAL OBJECT of lesson planning is not the schedule or other administrative detail description. It’s the brief, general idea that cleverly ties content and pedagogy.

Tom Woodward: The idea seems to be the key, maybe with a few rough details. It seems like you want a What Can You Do With This? but maybe with a structured template of information around the idea/media and the ability of people to link in more details/pieces?

Jason Dyer: I think most teachers know when they have a “mundane” piece of content and when they one like the water orchestra. Perhaps they can just be self-tagged? Therefore one can easily switch to a view that gets at the “meat” of the lessons and ignores how many minutes long it takes.

Steven Peters: I’m imagining something like a database of WCYDWT (like @Tom said) but with a pretty interface.

Vicky North: When I search for an idea online, which I often do, I scan past much of the lesson plans to find what is different that will inspire both my students and me.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

At this point, I’m worried that our unanimous agreement owes less to any group prescience and more to the preferences of the demographic that reads and comments on this blog. In other words, “is it just us?”

Elsewhere, I’d urge Steve and Jason toward simpler ideas of user interface. 3D visualization tools are too clever by half for conveying what is simple and good about an engaging lesson plan. Drilldown options for increasing the resolution on a lesson plan (ie. the big idea > the big idea plus objective > the big idea plus objective plus pacing guide) can be accomplished all within the same interface by using size and layout creatively. (For instance, BetterLesson would do well, in my opinion, to add a field for the teacher to describe “The Big Idea,” something with a limited character count, and then display that at the top of the lesson plan in large, strong type.

Pete is also exactly right:

Software shares with architecture and teaching the property that the environment in which a design/lesson is finally used is highly specific, and so a plan that is too tightly tied to a particular implementation/execution isn’t useful.

This is the Rule of Least Power, writ large in education.

@Derek, no disrespect to your initiative. You have a good idea but Flickr lacks a lot of the necessary ingredients for the site we need. Half-measures abound. As a temporary solution, I’ll urge people to contribute to your directory but, personally, I’m trying to find collaborators to code the site I have drawn up in my head and on paper.